Exclusive: NBN Co puts second data centre in Polaris

 

Deal signed.

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Front view of the $241m Polaris data centre in Springfield, Queensland. The data centre includes ...
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NBN Co has decided to locate its second national data centre within the state-of-the-art Polaris facility at Springfield in Queensland.

The contract was awarded despite NBN Co earmarking Melbourne as the location for its second data centre in September last year.

The deal represented another high-profile customer addition to the five-storey, $241 million Polaris data centre facility located south-west of Brisbane's CBD.

The centre already counted NEC, Suncorp, Citec and HP among its other major clients.

NBN Co's head of corporate services Kevin Brown told iTnews that the company was "establishing two world class data centres to provide essential computing capability to deliver a large-scale and resilient network".

"We're pleased that one of these centres is in Brisbane as it extends our national footprint and capability," he said.

NBN Co's primary data centre was located in Sydney's Global Switch after the network builder struck a three-year, $3 million deal late last year.

Both data centres were to be kitted out with a compute platform manufactured by Cisco Systems.

The platform will be based on Vblock virtual data centre technology packaged by the VCE alliance - VMware, Cisco and EMC.

It was unclear whether NBN Co would run its Sydney and Brisbane data centres in an active-active configuration.

Sources close to NBN Co told iTnews the option had been under consideration for several months, although it did not appear a firm decision had been made.

Some of the confusion over the location for NBN Co's second data centre may have been due to the presence of a large racking environment in its Docklands facility near Melbourne's CBD.

However, this space was to be used to house core switches and other kit owned by access seekers that sought NBN accreditation through the National Test Lab environment, and was not to be used to house equipment that ran NBN Co's IT environment.

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"I work at Springfield and while it is is near Ipswich (15kms) it is not in a flood zone. It is built on the Spring Mountain range and overlooks both the Ipsich and Brisbane CBDs in the distance - ..."
By adamn
 
 
 
Comments: 3
mbyrne
Feb 10, 2011 3:20 PM
How insane, to place a data storage facility in a flood zone.
rycrozier
Feb 10, 2011 7:59 PM
Which, to be fair, didn't flood in the last big flood. Nor did many other facilities much closer to the river.
adamn
Feb 11, 2011 10:24 AM
I work at Springfield and while it is is near Ipswich (15kms) it is not in a flood zone.

It is built on the Spring Mountain range and overlooks both the Ipsich and Brisbane CBDs in the distance - it also has highways from the east, south, north and west so Polaris was accessible throughout the entire flood crisis despite extensive road closures across the city.

The government departments and companies who use Polaris were very, very happy with their decisions to move to Polaris and you will see more announcements like this one in the near future as companies count the real costs of being isolated from both their primary and secondary sites.
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