Inside the Macquarie Telecom data centre refit

Macquarie Telecom’s Sydney data centre is undergoing a major refresh that will see the majority of racks supporting its managed services and managed co-location floors replaced by more efficient designs in the next three years.

The new racks are rated to various heat loads and include a sealed front door, inbuilt directional air-flow floor and incorporate intelligent power strips to enable Macquarie to effectively cool the rack and monitor power usage at the customer and socket level (see photo gallery right).

“The newer racks cost us approximately 50 percent more than the older-style ones,” said Denis Rowe, national marketing manager at Macquarie Telecom.

“The main difference in the physical design is the sealed –rather than perforated - door at the front of the rack. This gives us the best directional airflow within the rack itself and eliminates wasted cold air that simply blows out into the data centre.

Rowe told iTnews that the existing racks would be refreshed at the same time the equipment housed within them is upgraded. In the managed environment, that hardware is all owned by Macquarie.

It will take approximately two or three years to upgrade racks across the entire data centre.

Customers that are ready for hardware refreshes now will be shifted out of existing older-style data halls into an adjacent area that has been fitted out with the new racks.

The old racks will then be ripped out and replaced as well – a kind of rolling upgrade strategy that will eventually result in a completely upgraded data floor without impacting the environments managed on it.

One of the drivers for hardware upgrades in the data centre is virtualisation – although it is up to individual customers on whether they choose to go down that path. Whilst actively designing, building and managing virtualised hosting infrastructures for customers Macquarie does not force virtual servers on its customers, according to Rowe.

“We currently virtualise within a customer [environment], but not across customers within the data centre as a whole,” he said.

Interestingly, the trend to server virtualisation within some customers’ managed environments isn’t necessarily translating into the purchase of more blade architectures.

“It’s mostly high-end multi-core x86 servers [that we’re buying for virtualised customer environments],” said Brian Goodman-Jones, product manager for security and hosting at Macquarie Telecom.

“At this point the jury is still out with regard to blades, particularly from a price-performance standpoint for our customer needs.”

Still, the fact that standard x86 servers are smaller and more powerful than their predecessors is resulting in similar consolidation benefits for Macquarie.

“A Compaq ProLiant 1600 server is effectively a HP DL360 today,” said Rowe.

“We can get magnitudes greater processing power in a 1RU box as we used to fit in 5RU.”

This shrinkage and virtualisation growth, alongside hardware refresh cycles is effectively allowing Macquarie to grow the business within some the current data centre constraints around space, power, and cooling.

“As customers virtualise, it’s buying us more space,” explained Rowe.

New Macquarie managed virtualised customer environments typically run VMware ESX on Sun x64 range servers – although new hardware is always being evaluated and tested by Macquarie’s internal staging engineers.

“We don’t take procurement lightly,” said Rowe.

“As greening becomes a big factor we don’t believe the vendor hype. We test everything ourselves.”

What is interesting about profiling a data centre like Macquarie Telecom is that it has already faced up to some of the key challenges other operators are grappling with.

The centre occupies the middle floors of a sizable office tower in the Sydney CBD. Even before it opened in what Rowe invariably describes as the ‘not so convenient’ time just before the dotcom crash, Macquarie undertook some serious strengthening work to bring the building floor’s load-bearing capacity up to data centre standards.

“Ten years ago, we spent somewhere in the vicinity of $35 million alone on building the data centre infrastructure,” explained Rowe.

“Parts of the data centre floors have been structurally strengthened from the columns of the building to the core. Ensuring the key weight loads are pretty much transferred to the foundations.”

Power is also a key concern for many CBD operators in Australia – notably because many centres can’t grow beyond what are physical limitations of the capacity available on the grid.

“We don’t rely on any building power,” said Rowe.

“We have our own substation with N+1 redundancy throughout our power supply.”

The data centre also has two dedicated diesel generators and three chiller plants, physically located on the roof of the building’s annex.

“We’re independent from a facilities perspective,” Rowe said.

The managed services area runs 4 Liebert UPS. It also houses around 70 tonnes of batteries. In addition, every rack has a redundant power supply.

Security is also critical. The centre is one of only a handful in Australia to be certified to T4 ASIO levels , along with ISO27001, PCI DSS and DSD Gateway to 'Highly Protected' & 'Restricted' information classification levels.

Three-factor authentication is required to move almost anywhere within the managed data centre floor. The doors are magnetically locked and there is a strong surveillance component, with motion detection and fixed cameras recording constantly to HDD.

A separate highly-secure data hall houses restricted government properties like the Civil Aviation and Safety Authority (CASA) and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s web servers. This area is DSD gateway certified, and Macquarie recertifies to the standard every year.

“There can be and are random spot checks of the DSD area [carried out by government officials],” said Rowe.

From a disaster recovery perspective, Macquarie has a fully managed – and entirely virtualised – failover service that is physically located in an alternate third-party data centre in Melbourne. This is backed by firm service level guarantees for failover, Rowe said.

Running it on a virtualised platform makes it a cost-effective offering to customers looking for a way to implement disaster recovery that works, according to Rowe. The platform itself was built entirely in Macquarie’s staging area located in Sydney and then transported down to Melbourne.

“We designed and built the entire infrastructure, using the redundant Macquarie Telecom Internet core and national data network [to connect back to Sydney] to fully monitor and manage the service via our 24x7 operations centre.” added Goodman-Jones.

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