NextDC gets green light for Sydney data centre

Data centre operator NextDC (ASX:NXT) has been given the go-ahead to kick off construction on its latest data centre in Sydney, S1, which was initially announced back in March.

The company has received formal development approval from the City of Ryde Council for the construction of the facility at Macquarie Park on a site of 10,000 square metres, which is scheduled to go live in December 2012.

NextDC chief financial officer, Robin Khuda, told Computerworld Australia that the build of S1 will be headed up by FDC Construction and Fitout which will now begin preliminary work, while engineering design firm, Arup will design the facility.

The facility, located next to Fujitsu’s Sydney data centre, will provide about 5000 square metres of data halls with a 10 megawatt IT load. The site will be powered by Ausgrid and have fibre connectivity from numerous fibre operators including Telstra, Optus, Nextgen and AAPT.

According to Khuda, it will also include energy-saving initiatives including a tri-generation plant which the company is also considering building for its Melbourne data centre, M1.

“Sydney is pretty unique for us because what we’re looking at doing is deploying direct free cooling technology for half the facility so at night time or when the weather is below certain temperatures rather than running all the systems you can adjust the load and save a fair bit of electricity.

“What the tri generation plant does is it uses gas to generate power, gas is more environmentally friendly than generating electricity using coal,” Khuda said. “The other interesting feature is the heat you’re generating can actually absorb that electricity and use it for cooling as well.”

However, Khuda said the tri generation plant would not be built by the time the facility goes live, but would hinge customer demand for the facility and return on investment.

The company has appointed John Turner as its project manager for S1, who has been with the company “a few months”. Previously he held senior positions with Westpac and CSC, where he was responsible for the delivery of critical operation facilities, data centres and large scale commercial projects throughout the Asia Pacific region.

The company in July, also flagged plans to open new data centres in Canberra and Perth as part of a push to develop a national Cloud computing footprint.

The 6,000m² Canberra data centre, formerly occupied by a major government agency, will provide high security under an ASIO-T4 physical security specification.

It has also gone live with its Brisbane-based facility, B1, after it received key document from a final building inspection.

Follow Chloe Herrick on Twitter: @chloe_CW

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

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