The missing middle
Somewhere in most small offices there is a rack with four things in it and room for forty. Moving those four things into a real data centre sounds simple. The economics of how data centres are sold make it anything but.
Two facts get in the way. The smallest unit they sell is bigger than the load. And the unit they sell does not include the one thing the move was supposed to fix.
The unit of sale is a cabinet
NEXTDC and Equinix are excellent. NEXTDC's P1 in Malaga is Tier III certified and built, in their own words, for "enterprise and government environments." Equinix runs PE2 in Shenton Park, carrier-neutral and wired into its global fabric. For a cage, a private suite, or a hundred kilowatts of draw, these are the right names.
Source: https://www.nextdc.com/data-centres/perth-data-centres/p1-perth
Their model is the catch. Both facilities are engineered to land large tenants on long commitments, so the minimum footprint, the contract term and the sales motion are all sized for that tenant. The smallest sensible unit is a cabinet. A quarter rack, at a push.
Four things and room for forty does not fill a cabinet. The options narrow to two: Take a full rack and cool empty air for two years, or leave the gear in the office. Most small operators stall on exactly that choice.
The market is widening the gap, not closing it. Australia's data-centre boom has become an AI and hyperscale story; national policy is courting global hyperscalers, NSW alone is fast-tracking around AUD $52 billion of major projects, and the law firm A&O Shearman notes the approvals now "appear designed to favour established operators over smaller entrants." The capital is chasing tenants who take megawatts. The cabinet-scale customer is not served better as the market grows. They are skipped.
The cabinet does not come with a network
A colocation contract delivers space, power, cooling and a cross-connect. It does not deliver a presence on the internet. That is a separate build, and a specialist one, and it stays invisible until the gear is racked and the contract is signed.
Standing on the internet as an independent network, with addressing and reputation under one's own control, takes four things, none of them quick:
- IP space. An allocation from APNIC, the regional registry, which has almost none left to give. APNIC states it plainly: "There is not enough unused IPv4 address space left for networks to grow." A new member is capped at a single /23, 512 addresses. Beyond that the only supply is the transfer market, where Asia-Pacific blocks carry a premium.
- An ASN, and BGP run correctly. An autonomous system number is a network's identity in the global routing table. Announcing space means running BGP with the filtering, prefix limits and route hygiene that keep one error from causing an outage, or a leak onto the wider internet.
- Redundant transit. Two independent carriers at minimum, with failover engineered to actually hold, so one carrier's bad day is not an outage.
- Peering. A port on the local exchange, so traffic to nearby networks takes the short path rather than paying transit for the long way around.
None of it ships with the cabinet. All of it is exacting network engineering that does not scale down to a few rack units. The office ran on one business line and one router. A cabinet, run properly, demands a small carrier. That is the bill nobody quotes upfront.
Source: https://www.apnic.net/manage-ip/ipv4-exhaustion/
One rung solves both
Rackmill sits inside Equinix PE2. Not nearby, not a partner facility. The same building.
The gear lives in that facility, and other people's gear colocates alongside it, from a single rack unit up. That answers the size problem on its own. A single server goes into the exact building it was being evaluated for, at cabinet-grade everything, without paying for forty units of empty space.
The network is already built. It runs Rackmill's own operation, and a colocation customer inherits it on day one:
- An ASN (AS154167), two IPv4 /24 blocks and IPv6, so the addressing and its reputation are controlled in-house, not borrowed from an upstream. That reputation is worth controlling, and we have written about why IP reputation matters. APNIC delegated the second /24 in June 2026: Room to grow into, on a market where new space is increasingly hard to find.
- Two 10 Gbps transit providers, Managed Networks and Cogent, so no single carrier is a single point of failure.
- WA-IX peering and a bilateral session with Hurricane Electric, so local traffic takes the short path.
A working network is the quiet part. Ours is already running, so colocated gear can plug in on day one.
When the cabinet is the right answer
When the load has outgrown the middle. A genuine need for a cage, dense high-draw racks or a private suite, or an enterprise with the procurement weight to stand up its own ASN and transit, is what NEXTDC and Equinix are built for. That is a referral, not a rivalry.
The middle is the band between the office and the cage: the MSP running a handful of client servers, the business with hardware it depends on and nowhere safe to put it, the load whose next step is a real facility rather than a private suite. For that load, a full rack is a size problem it does not have yet, bolted to a network problem it never wanted.
The specifics
For the operator who recognises their own situation in this, the shape of it:
- Plans. A single rack unit from AUD $120 per month, up to a full rack at AUD $3,200, with power and included data scaling through the tiers. Extra IPs are $10 per address per month, extra data $30 per TB, and the occasional overage is not billed. All prices in AUD.
- The facility. Equinix PE2, 1/37 Lemnos St, Shenton Park WA 6008: Carrier-neutral, N+1 power (UPS plus generator), proper cooling, 24/7 secure access.
- Access. Customers rack their own gear, escorted by arrangement. The 1RU to 6RU plans get business-hours access on 24 hours' notice; 10RU and up gets 24/7. Remote hands covers the rest.
Where to start
The space between a server in the office and a cabinet in an enterprise facility is the whole reason Rackmill exists.
We are a small Perth operation that cares about getting this right. Tell us what you run and where it lives now, and we will give you an honest answer about whether we are the right home for it, or whether the load has genuinely outgrown the middle.
Plans, specifications and the conversation: https://rackmill.au/colocation