Primus completes $2m upgrade to fight outages

Following three service outages so far this year, Primus Telecom over the weekend completed an upgrade to the power systems of its Melbourne data centre.

Primus Telecom CEO Ravi Bhatia said the company decided to upgrade its systems following an outage in February.

Since then, customers have reported outages on at least two further occasions, most recently two weeks ago.

"The first time we had an outage, which was at the beginning of February, it was extremely concerning to us and the company opened its wallet and decided to fix it," Bhatia told iTnews.

He said the most recent outage was "truly unfortunate" because it happened just a week before a scheduled upgrade of the facility's power systems.

An earlier upgrade in May was said to have made the Primus data centre "beyond bulletproof".

However, today Bhatia warned that a multitude of factors were combining to threaten Australia's ability to feed its unquenchable thirst for electricity.

"Most of our power plants are close to the end of their design life; a lot of these utilities are being privatised and there is significant uncertainty in the future because of the carbon trading scheme. High voltage and high power is a subject [this IT community] does not understand," Bhatia said.