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Photos: The iTnews Power Panel

iTnews profiles the executives building Australia's next generation of data centres.

on Mar 26 2012 6:00AM

iTnews brought together ten executives building Australia's next generation of data centres to discuss the key issues facing the industry in 2012. Lunch was provided at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, courtesy of sponsor Brocade. Read on for profiles of our ten panelists.

Damon Reid is the managing director of Global Switch in Sydney. Global Switch is Australia’s largest data centre, with in excess of 24,000 square metres of operational raised floor space in Ultimo, Sydney powered by 22MW of IT-available UPS capacity. The extention to the existing facility, Sydney East, will add a further14,000 square metres of raised floor space and another 22MW of available UPS capacity. iTnews has reported that Global Switch customers include NBN Co and The Department of Defence, among many others. Global Switch’s key differentiators include its financial strength, wholesale business model, resilience, carrier choice and neutrality and its low-latency CBD location. Damon Reid started with Global Switch as operations manager before moving across to the commercial role responsible for Asia Pacific. These roles gave Damon a wealth of knowledge on Australia’s largest users of data centre space as well as the requirements of running the largest data centre in Australia. At the beginning of 2011 Damon took over the role of Managing Director, Sydney and since that time has seen the facility let to near full capacity and been intimately involved in the planning and development of the Sydney east extension.

Jon Curry is general manager of managed data centres at Telstra. Australia’s telco incumbent has over 25,000 square metres of data centre space used for internal purposes (BigPond etc) and the provision of hosting, managed IT services and cloud compute to enterprise and Government customers. Jon’s team is currently building a 6MW facility in Melbourne adjoining an existing 5MW facility to help consolidate legacy data centres spread around the nation. iTnews has reported that Telstra cloud customers include industrial giants Visy and Kohmatsu among others. Telstra also operates Australia’s largest terrestrial and mobile networks. Jon has an impressive legacy of infrastructure project and management roles at the likes of Telecom NZ, NAB, Coca-Cola Amatil and Allianz.

Tony Simonsen is managing director of Equinix Australia. Equinix is a global company with over 100 data centres in 38 countries, its three data centres in Sydney grossing over 30,000 square metres with a new phase soon to come online in the Sydney3 facility. iTnews has reported that Equinix customers include the Chi-X stock exchange, cloud services provider OrionVM and Cricial Paradigm, among many others. The key differentiator for Equinix is to connect ecosystems together – be that a trading platform with the systems of its stockbroking customers, or a cloud computing provider with its enterprise customers. Tony takes over at Equinix Australia following a long career in technology sales and services for the likes of EMC and Cisco Systems.

Malcolm Roe is general manager of Leighton-owned Metronode. The company data centres is investing in a national network of data centres – with five existing 10,000 square metre facilities in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth plus plans or construction underway for four new facilities in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and regional NSW. Metronode’s latest build in Melbourne is a 3MW modular fit-out on a 12MW site – the first in the world to stack modular BladeRoom data halls and free air cooling units on top of each other. The facility will only need to be cooled by chillers for two percent of the year. Metronode's key differentiators are its national network, great uptime record and low power consumption. Metronode claims to have never lost a single minute in downtime in nine years. Malcolm has worked in the telco divisions of Leighton Holdings for some 11 years, but also has experience in management and sales with networking vendor Alcatel.

Aidan Tudehope is managing director of hosting at Macquarie Telecom. Macquarie Telecom offers managed hosting services from two of its own facilities in Sydney. The first, IC1, is a 3.5MW, DSD-certified facility with clients including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, WebJet and Quickflix. The second is a $60 million 8MW facility due to open within the next few months in Macquarie Park with News Limited named as an anchor tenant. Macquarie Telecom’s focus has traditionally been around superior customer service. But the new Macquarie Park provides a new opportunity: it is the first design-certified facility in South-East Asia to be certified Tier III by the Uptime Institute, pointing to a new standard of operational and power efficiency. Aidan has managed the technology operations of Macquarie Telecom for close to 20 years.

Andrew Maclaren is sales director of Digital Realty. Digital Realty owns and leases 19 million square feet of data centre space across 102 global data centres, turns over U$1.1 billion annually and has a market capitalisation of US$8 billion. The company set up its first Australian office in May 2011 and is spending $350 million building four facilities in Australia on two campuses in Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney facility will offer 8000 square metres raised floor across two buildings and 11.2 MW of power from October 2012. The Melbourne facility is 6000 square metres across two buildings and 8.64 MW of capacity. The first has been fully leased to National Australia Bank – the second will offer 5.76 MW of capacity from from Q1 2013. Andrew has responsibility for Digital Realty’s sales in Australia and has previously worked in the telecommunications sector. Digital Realty’s primary differentiator is using its scale and operational expense model to reduce the risk of data centre ownership and deployment for enterprise customers and service providers.

Greg Boorer is managing director of Canberra Data Centres. In operation for the last three years, CDC features two six megawatt data centres – the latest of which was opened in December 2011. iTnews has noted a number of large Federal Government agencies moving workloads to the facility, most notably the Department of Human Services and CrimTrac. CDC is among the few AGIMO-approved enterprise grade data centres serving the Federal Government market in Canberra.

Marty Gauvin is chief executive officer at Tier5. Tier5 is gradually building out an 8MW facility in Adelaide based on Dell’s third generation of modular data centre, offering wholesale access (over 1MW) to aggregators and hosting companies. The company's modular approach allows Tier5 to only add plant as customers come on board to take up compute load. Marty Gauvin previously founded and eventually exited one of Australia’s largest enterprise hosting companies, Hostworks, before founding Tier5.

Glenn Gore is chief technology officer at Melbourne IT. Melbourne IT’s domain name and web hosting operations manage over 650KW of IT load from 770 square metres of data centre space leased in three locations around Australia. Marquee customers include the Queensland Department of Education & Training, Smart Service Queensland and Credit Union Australia. Glenn has managed the company’s IT engineering for some seven years after similar roles at MCI WorldCom and Ozemail. Today he manages the R&D programs and strategic direction of the company.

Mike Andrea is a director of Strategic Directions, a firm hired by enterprise customers to make decisions on whether to refurbish their facility, consume co-location services or adopt a managed service agreement for their infrastructure needs. The organisation is also involved in large data centre build projects such as the Polaris Data Centre in regional Queensland. Mike was the first non-US citizen appointed a board member for the AFCOM Data Center Institute.

Guests at the iTnews Power Panel roundtable were asked their opinions on such issues as market demand, power prices and the carbon tax, the NBN, data centre financing, network and power elasticity and rogue IT.

Jon Curry is general manager of managed data centres at Telstra described how he would like to move workloads between various cities according to peak and off-peak power rates and ambient temperatures. “I think we will move to a stage where the IT load and the facility itself – the power and cooling - will work together,” he said.

Aidan Tudehope, managing director of hosting at Macquarie Telecom said the carbon tax was a boon for those running energy efficient co-lo facilities. The NBN rollout, he said, was "effectively a $30 billion shot in the arm for the IT industry. The distinction between WAN and LAN will be removed when the NBN arrives at your office.”

Marty Gauvin, CEO at Tier5 described the strains cloud computing architectures have placed on data centres, especially the scourge of replicated storage. He was also supportive of the NBN. “The NBN is creating a significant build of data centre capacity outside of Sydney for the first time in Australia’s history," he said.

Glenn Gore, CTO at Melbourne IT called for stronger partnerships between data centre operators and managed service providers. He predicts a wholesale change in the nature of enterprise IT architecture in the coming years, which could make way for "spot pricing" of power consumption.

Damon Reid, managing director of Global Switch in Sydney talked about the ever increasing density of IT loads and said spot pricing on power in data centres was several years off.

Brocade's Ian Whiting talked about what networking vendors are doing to meet some of the architectural challenges facing data centre operators. While long-distance transfer of large data sets and applications are still not yet perfected, Whiting said Brocade was preparing for a more elastic future by offering service providers a consumption-based/leasing model on switching products.

Greg Boorer, managing director of Canberra Data Centres explained that financing options for data centres required any new build to be part-funded by an anchor tenant.

The forum was moderated by iTnews editor, Brett Winterford and sponsored by Brocade.

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