Fujitsu adds ambient cooling in data centre upgrade

Fujitsu has added ambient cooling and rainwater collection to its Noble Park data centre in Melbourne in an attempt to lower the facility's power usage effectiveness (PUE) to a target of 1.7.

The 24-year-old facility re-opened last week after a $60 million upgrade which saw the company double its technical floorspace to 4000 square metres over four main data halls.

It is expected to meet Tier III uptime standards though the company's group executive director of managed services, Tim White, said it would not seeking an official accreditation from the Uptime Institute unless specified by a client.

Instead, he said, the upgrade focused on improving the centre's environmental efficiency and lowering its demand on surrounding infrastructure.

"The big thing for us was that, we've got a good facility and we wanted to expand it to allow more floor space on top of it, but we also wanted to tap into the power in an efficient way," White told iTnews.

This included the ability to collect rainwater on-site as well as ambient cooling that utilises Melbourne's lower outside air temperatures when available.

It is unclear how the upgraded facility will split the ratio of ambient and chilled cooling the facility, but White said it would be able to switch in real-time between the two cooling types.

The upgraded facility is expected to primarily service Fujitsu's co-location and hybrid cloud customers, with approximately 1000 square metres of the newly available floorspace already tied up in tenancy deals.

"We can see the market demand is there at the moment with both our existing and new clients, plus the move to cloud computing and virtual client computing provides the increased demand for centralised data," he said.

"There's capability to expand but at this time that's a year or two off."