CSIRO looks for Canberra data centre space

The CSIRO has revealed plans to expand its data centre footprint in Canberra by March next year with at least 500 square metres of IT equipment space.

The research agency said in a detailed tender that it needed the space to "meet the growing needs of the enterprise and scientific community".

It also had some specific requirements around the power densities that the facility had to be capable of supporting – a 2kw per square metre minimum density, although the likelihood was that high-density pockets of equipment would need to be supported.

"As at 2011, 500 kW to 1 MW per 500 square metre of net lettable area [in data centres] will suit most, but not all agencies," the CSIRO said.

"In particular, science agencies may require 4 to 5 MW per 500 square metres to accommodate their specialised high performance computing equipment.

"This figure for power demand includes ICT equipment alone, and is exclusive of the mechanical and electrical overheads."

The CSIRO said it was likely that dense pockets of blade servers, mainframes, tape libraries and large scale storage area networks would need to operate side-by-side with more normal rack densities.

"The blade servers may require 8 kW to 30kW per square metre, the mainframe 3 kW per square metre and the tape library 500 watts per square metre," CSIRO said.