Photos: Building Metronode's Melbourne2 data centre

The great benefit of this modular approach is that provided you have a large site (this is 24,000 square metres) and lots of local power (12MW IT Load), you can gradually build a very large data centre without spending too much capital. Metronode is building a ring road around the site such that it can continue to add data halls and plant rooms as demand comes on, each time within a short few months. The company already has one data hall committed with a large IT service provider and cloud computing provider, and a government client in final negotiation to most of the upstairs hall. So work on a second stage (of 2 blade rooms) will begin no sooner than phase one goes live.