Inside the Macquarie Telecom data centre refit

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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