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Frequently Asked Questions

Fundamentals

Colocation (or ‘colo’) is straightforward: you put your own servers, storage and network equipment in a purpose-built data centre rather than managing the building, power and cooling yourself. You keep control of your hardware, applications and data. We look after the environment that keeps them running.

With Macquarie Data Centres’ colocation, that also means sovereign Australian infrastructure, secure access, carrier choice and engineers on hand when you need them. Whether you’re after a few racks at IC1 in Sydney CBD or a larger environment at IC2 in Macquarie Park, we’ll help design it around your requirements, not force your architecture into a standard package.

If your IT team is spending more time worrying about the server room than moving the business forward, something needs to change. Colocation gives your equipment professionally managed power, cooling, physical security and connectivity, without asking you to build and run a specialist facility.

The real benefit is taking building-level risk and day-to-day facilities management off your team’s plate. At Macquarie, you also get a 100% uptime guarantee and a track record spanning more than 25 years, carrier-neutral connectivity and Intellihands engineers who can work on your equipment when your own people can’t be onsite. You keep the control; we take on the heavy lifting.

Usually, your infrastructure tells you before your spreadsheet does. The air conditioning is working overtime. There’s no sensible place for another rack. A power outage has turned into an executive conversation. Or the business needs stronger security, uptime and recovery arrangements than an office server room can realistically provide.

Those are good reasons to look at colocation before you hit a hard limit. We’ll talk through your power draw, growth, connectivity, risk and migration window, then help you plan the move. Our data centre relocation guide is a useful place to start if you’re already looking at your options.

Finding the right Sydney fit

It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. They’re not interchangeable, and that’s the point.

  • IC1 Sydney CBD: Sydney’s first commercial colocation data centre and Australia’s only sovereign data centre in the CBD. It’s well suited to secure rack or cage deployments when being close to your people and Central Station matters.
  • IC2 Macquarie Park: built for enterprise, government and wholesale colocation where you need a larger footprint, more power options, high-performance connectivity or room to plan the next stage.

Both give you access to Macquarie’s operational expertise, security and carrier neutrality. Tell us what you’re running and what comes next; we’ll be frank about which site suits you. If the answer is elsewhere on our Macquarie Park campus, we’ll tell you that too.

Location is not just a pin on a map. It affects how quickly your team can get to site, which connectivity options make sense and how you structure your business continuity plan.

IC1 is at 477 Pitt Street in Sydney CBD, approximately three minutes’ walk from Central Station, useful when staff or suppliers need convenient access. IC2 is at 17–23 Talavera Road, Macquarie Park, in Sydney’s North Zone and part of an interconnected campus built for enterprise and larger-scale workloads. If you’re deciding between them, we’ll look at access, latency, operational requirements and resilience together rather than just the postcode.

You shouldn’t have to buy more space than you need, or discover too late that you can’t grow. We can discuss individual racks, secure cages and, depending on the facility and requirements, dedicated suites or wholesale-scale environments.

For CBD rack and cage deployments, start with IC1. For a bigger or more customised environment, IC2 and the wider Macquarie Park campus are likely to be part of the conversation. Tell us how many racks you need, the power per rack, who needs access and what your next expansion might look like. We’ll work from there.

Here’s a helpful starting point: IC1 has a published facility specification of 1,330 m² of technical space and 2 MW total IT load; IC2 has 3,200 m² and 6 MW respectively. Those are facility specifications, not a promise of immediately available capacity.

What matters to your design is the power and space we can allocate to your deployment, alongside density, redundancy, cooling and future requirements. For high-density or AI workloads, we’ll also assess the right fit across our Macquarie Park campus, rather than assuming every rack belongs in the same type of environment.

Absolutely, but don’t settle for ‘yes, we can scale’ without asking how. Will you be able to add racks next to your existing footprint? What happens if the power per rack changes? Could your next phase need a dedicated cage or suite? Those are the questions worth asking before you sign.

We support different footprints and reference architectures across IC1, IC2 and our wider Sydney portfolio. Our guide to choosing a data centre explains why a credible capacity roadmap matters as much as the capacity available on day one. We’ll help you plan for both.

There’s no useful one-size-fits-all rack price. A low headline rate is not much help if it excludes the power, connectivity, security or support your environment actually needs.

Pricing depends on your space and deployment type; contracted power and consumption; cooling and density; cross connects and connectivity; required security and onsite support; and contract term. Our cost of colocation guide explains the major cost drivers. If you share your requirements with our colocation team, we can talk through a fit-for-purpose commercial model instead of sending you a generic number.

Connectivity and cloud

Yes, and we mean your choice of provider, not just a choice from one proprietary network. Both IC1 and IC2 are carrier- and cloud-neutral, so you can work with preferred carriers, build resilient paths and avoid unnecessary lock-in.

We’re part of Macquarie Technology Group, but we don’t make you buy the Group’s telecommunications or cloud services to use our facilities. Explore our connectivity ecosystem, and we’ll help you design the right mix for your requirements.

Think beyond a single internet service. Depending on the site and design, we can discuss internet transit, fibre and dark fibre, physical cross connects, data centre interconnects, cloud on-ramps and diverse network paths.

Our network and connectivity services include connections within a site and between supported facilities. And through partners such as Megaport and Console Connect, customers can reach a much wider ecosystem. We’ll help you balance carrier choice, performance, resilience and cost, not just throw a list of providers at you.

It’s a dedicated physical connection between your equipment and another rack, carrier or service inside a data centre or connected campus. Think of it as a direct route instead of taking the long way around over the public internet.

A cross connect can be useful when you need predictable connectivity to a network provider, partner or another environment. At Macquarie, cross connects and data centre interconnects can also link environments across the same campus, for example, between IC2 and IC3. We’ll help work out the right technical path for your use case.

Yes. You don’t need to choose between keeping critical systems on infrastructure you control and using the public cloud where it makes sense. We offer cloud connectivity pathways for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with the specific service and delivery method determined by your design.

Depending on the architecture, private or partner-enabled connectivity can provide more predictable network paths than routing everything over the public internet. Tell us which clouds you use, your bandwidth and latency needs, and where the applications live. We’ll help map the options.

Keep the workloads that need dedicated infrastructure on your own hardware, connect to the cloud services that give you flexibility, and place each application where it makes operational and commercial sense. That’s the practical appeal of hybrid and multi-cloud: not putting everything in one basket.

A carrier-neutral colocation environment gives you a stable foundation, while our network and cloud on-ramp options support connectivity between locations and platforms. You can also draw on expertise across the broader Macquarie Technology Group where useful, without losing the freedom to choose your providers. For the fundamentals, see cloud versus colocation.

Security, sovereignty and compliance

‘Hosted in Australia’ and ‘sovereign’ are not always the same thing. If ownership, operational control, access to infrastructure and legal jurisdiction matter to your risk profile, you need to ask who really owns and runs the facility, not just where the servers sit.

Macquarie Data Centres is Australian owned and operated, part of the ASX-listed Macquarie Technology Group, with Australian operational expertise and a portfolio of sovereign data centres. We own and operate our infrastructure and understand the local requirements that government and regulated organisations face. It’s a meaningful distinction when control matters as much as location.

Security isn’t a turnstile and a CCTV camera. Your environment needs layers of protection from the perimeter to the rack, with the right people and procedures behind them.

Our IC1 and IC2 facilities use controlled-access security zones, 24×7 monitoring, biometric and RFID-based access controls and physically protected customer environments. We also support government-aligned security requirements and offer cleared personnel. The controls that apply to your installation depend on its facility, area and classification. We’ll walk you through the relevant measures rather than hand you a generic compliance list.

We have extensive certifications and assurance programs, but the detail matters. Don’t just ask whether a provider has a badge; ask which facility, enclave and service it covers, and whether that matches your workload.

Our compliance and certifications portfolio covers relevant ISO standards, SOC reporting, PCI DSS physical-security requirements, DISP, SCEC-assessed environments and the Australian Government Hosting Certification Framework. IC1 and IC2 publish their facility capabilities. We’ll confirm the applicable scope and supporting evidence for your particular deployment before you rely on it for an audit or procurement decision.

Yes. We support government, Defence, critical infrastructure and other risk-sensitive organisations, environments where ‘secure enough’ simply isn’t good enough.

Our government colocation offering brings together Australian ownership and operation, security-cleared personnel, rigorous physical controls and certified infrastructure. Macquarie Technology Group supports 42% of Australian Federal Government agencies. For sensitive workloads, we’ll work through your classification, security zoning, certifications and procurement needs so the proposed environment is genuinely suitable, not just presented as suitable.

Certified Strategic is the highest level of assurance under the Australian Government’s Hosting Certification Framework. It matters because government hosting isn’t just about a secure building. Ownership, control, personnel and supply-chain arrangements all count.

Macquarie has Certified Strategic infrastructure, including relevant facilities and enclaves. The exact certification scope needs to be checked against your selected location and service. For a buyer handling sensitive workloads, it gives you an important starting point for due diligence, not a substitute for checking your own obligations.

You may need dedicated colocation today and a sovereign cloud option tomorrow. Being able to have that conversation with a single Australian technology group can remove a lot of unnecessary complexity.

Macquarie Technology Group has achieved Certified Strategic status across both data centre and cloud services. That means we can help you consider sovereign colocation alongside other Group capabilities, while preserving the carrier and cloud neutrality of our facilities. We’ll work with the architecture you actually want, rather than insisting everything sit on one platform.

Yes. There are more than 200 government security-cleared engineers across Macquarie’s operations, and our Intellihands service gives colocation customers access to hands-on technical support around the clock.

That matters when there’s a failed device at 2am, a replacement part to install or a rack build that shouldn’t require flying your whole team to Sydney. For high-security environments, we’ll confirm the personnel, clearances and access arrangements required for your specific space.

Resilience, support and relocation

Downtime isn’t an abstract data centre metric when your customers, staff or critical services are relying on your systems. That’s why we lead with something you can hold us to: a 100% uptime guarantee, backed by more than 25 years of uninterrupted operating history.

Our facilities use resilient power, cooling and critical infrastructure systems, with configurations matched to the site and workload. At IC2, for example, the power architecture includes diesel rotary UPS (DRUPS). Ask us about the design, maintenance arrangements, service terms and operating evidence relevant to your environment. A glossy uptime promise is easy; operational proof is what matters.

Yes, but resilience starts with the architecture, not just a second address. We can help you consider separate environments, resilient connectivity, backup and recovery arrangements, and multi-site deployments across our Sydney and Canberra locations, where suitable.

Whether you’re planning active-active services or a recovery site, we’ll want to understand your recovery time and recovery point objectives, dependencies and testing regime. Our network interconnect options can support multi-site designs, but the right solution depends on your applications, data and risk appetite.

Our service is called Intellihands, and it’s not just someone switching a power button on your behalf. Government-cleared engineers can act as an extension of your IT team, 24x7x365, with the technical expertise to handle everything from urgent faults to routine changes.

Think device reboots, hardware swaps, cabling, visual checks, installations, rack-and-stack work and entire builds. If your engineer is offsite, interstate or simply flat out, we can get qualified hands on the equipment. We do hard well, and we know that support is where a provider proves it.

Yes, and we know a data centre move is not something you want to improvise on a Friday afternoon. The physical move is only one piece; discovery, cabling, dependencies, carrier cutovers, testing and a realistic rollback plan all matter.

Our team can help plan and coordinate the journey, from your first environment audit through to installation and validation, with the aim of managing risk and minimising disruption. Read our data centre relocation guide and tell us the size of the environment and your migration window. We’ll help make the plan practical.

Prefer to see it for yourself?

Book a data centre tour of IC1 or IC2, or talk to one of our specialists. Bring the awkward questions, your reference architecture and your growth plans. We'd rather have a useful conversation than give you a generic sales pitch.