LinkedIn Opens First International Data Centre In Singapore

LinkedIn has spent £42m (SGP $80m) on its first data centre outside of the United States, leasing 23,500 square feet from Digital Realty’s facility in Jurong, Singapore.

The data centre will be handling the entirety of LinkedIn’s Asia-Pacific traffic, which LinkedIn claims is around a third of its global total.

Trans-Pacific

As number of LinkedIn users across Asia Pacific has doubled over the last two years to reach more than 85 million members at the end of 2015, LinkedIn said it felt the need to expand and increase its ability to serve members there.

“We knew that our regional PoPs were no longer enough. To meet this need, LinkedIn’s first international data centre located in Singapore, went online in March 2016,” wrote LinkedIn engineer Michael Yamaguchi on the company’s blog.

Singapore is also an attractive location for data centres because it is the landing point for the trans-Pacific fibre, reducing latency to North America.

LinkedIn’s data centre has 4.2 megawatts of allocated power, around the same power allocation as its Oregon data centre will use when it comes online later in 2016.

Yamaguchi said that the facility is smaller than LinkedIn’s Virginia and Texas data centres, however.

“The smart design features we’re implementing in Singapore will reduce the annual energy consumption of the data centre by a magnitude that is equivalent to powering about 100 private homes in Singapore a year,” he wrote.

TechWeekEurope asked LinkedIn if it had any plans for European data centre in the near future, but the company declined to comment.

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