Exclusive: NBN Co puts second data centre in Polaris

NBN Co has decided to locate its second national data centre within the state-of-the-art Polaris facility at Springfield in Queensland.

Linked gallery: Photos: Inside the Polaris Data Centre

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.