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Photos: Inside the Polaris Data Centre

iTnews takes a tour of the new $241 million Polaris Data Centre in Springfield, Queensland.

on Dec 8 2009 12:23PM

Front view of the $241m Polaris data centre in Springfield, Queensland. The data centre includes three floors of computer rooms, tenanted by NEC, Suncorp, HP, Citec, Queensland Gas, Pipe Networks and Ipswich City Council.

After identifying ourselves at the front security desk, the tour officially begins on the fifth floor of the data centre, which houses Polaris' power and cooling infrastructure. We start with this photo - taken out of a gated-in concrete platform that sticks off the fifth floor, to give you some context for the next few photos...

How, might you ask, does one ship in heavy power and cooling equipment onto the fifth floor of a data centre? Check out the next photo for the answer...

Polaris cranes in the heaviest of its power and cooling gear. Here we stand on a concrete platform on the fifth floor - the gate above opens for cranes to lift in generators, UPS systems etc - before the equipment is wheeled through the shutter door and into the building.

A shot of the gate that sits across the roof of the concrete platform. The heaviest piece of equipment that has been craned in? A 20 tonne generator...

Here is a shot of the two chiller units that provide air conditioning to the facility. Note that the end caps are off as the units were undergoing maintenance work upon our arrival. These machines come in at 1500kW. Your average house is cooled by a 5kW split system. Do the maths, this is one chunky piece of very cool kit. Excuse the pun.

Much of the heavier power and cooling equipment is installed on springs, which in turn sit atop shock absorbing concrete pads. Such heavy duty equipment can produce harmonic vibrations - a distortion that can shake away the structure of the building if such precautions are overlooked.

Polaris' twin generators can kick into gear to run the data centre at full load within 12 seconds, while its UPS (uninterruptable power supply) units can hold a full-load for 16-seconds before these generators kick in.

One of two 20-tonne generators ready to kick in should Polaris' power supply be cut short.

Now we are down at level one, where electricity and fibre connections enter the building. It is also where engineers can access Polaris' sizeable water tank. That air con system you just saw needs a lot of water. To the left of this shot you can see a metallic wall buckling under the pressure of 1.5 million tonnes of water. That is enough for 48 hours of operating the data centre at full load.

Water passes through these cooling towers and throughout the data centre some six times before it leaves the building. From here it is transported back to Ipswich City Council for recycling, before it is re-treated and sent back to the data centre.

Polaris has a design load of some 20 megawatts at full capacity. Here you can see one of two 11,000 volt power supplies housed within the building.

Low voltage switching area.

Polaris is fitted with some 420 bottles of Proinert fire suppression gas. That's enough gas to dump the entire 7000-odd square metres of data centre floors, plus the UPS room, generator room and transformer room, twice over.

The beauty of Proinert is its sustained release - instead of "blasting the walls out", it causes no damage to the infrastructure below when sprayed onto the fire. It is believed humans can also temporarily breathe in it - giving engineers enough time to get to an exit. All doors in Polaris are colour coded - green means it is an exit or at least leads to one.

Level one also houses Polaris' test bay. This is where tennants can bring in new equipment to test or set-up, minimising the potential of causing problems on the server room floor.

Level one also includes a truck loading bay to lift in servers, racks and storage arrays. No cardboard or wood pallets are allowed inside, so the machines must be unpacked in this room.

The three floors of server rooms are secured by man-trap security doors. A biometric reader is required to open the first door to get inside the man-trap, and a second proximity card is required to open the second door to enter the server room.

One of three 2333 metre squared server room floors within Polaris (which equates to 6000 square metres of actual rack space).

NEC's 306 racks worth of space. Plenty of room to spare.

NEC's Loren Weiner stands by his new APC racks within the Polaris Data Centre.

An unnamed customer is housed within this security cage. NEC has plans to install a cage of its own.

NEC has made a huge investment in Polaris - here you can see the company's logo being positioned above an office building next door, where NEC has also rented office space.

Polaris.

Polaris, with the security entrance at the bottom of frame.

Polaris sits alongside one office building, but is otherwise free-standing in an undeveloped area of Springfield.

Linked Articles

Exclusive: NBN Co puts second data centre in Polaris Polaris a pricey jewel in NEC's crown CITEC to consolidate Queensland data centres Photos: Inside the Polaris Data Centre

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