Photos: Inside the AAPT Richmond data centre

AAPT has started talks with Citipower for a substation upgrade that would allow it to potentially expand its data centre in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond.

Linked gallery: Inside the AAPT Richmond data centre

The building, which was originally a bank cheque processing facility, was taken over by AAPT in 1990 and transformed into a data centre. It was one of 14 data centres owned by AAPT in Australia.

While the Richmond data centre had adequate headroom in its power allocation - it was operating at about 80 percent of the building's capacity - chief operating officer David Yuile said the telco was examining its power options for the long-term.

"We're getting close to the limit of the substation," Yuile said.

"That's something we've been talking to CitiPower about. [But] I don't think we'll ever bring the facility to danger levels [in terms of exhausting its power allocation]."

Yuile said that a substation upgrade would cost somewhere in the region of "seven figures as a starting number."

He said AAPT had recently completed a $1 million substation upgrade at its Glebe data centre. That upgrade saw workers excavate the site by hand to avoid damaging underground cables.

"It was like an archaeological dig," Yuile said.

Upgrading the Richmond substation was the key to unlocking a long-term proposal to expand the data centre.

"There's a dearth of space and capable facilities in Melbourne," Yuile said.

"Whether we could expand this facility is an energy-led discussion. We would have to do a substation upgrade."

Read on to page two for AAPT's power management strategy for the existing colo space - and for a sneak peek at a brand new offering soon to enter beta.

AAPT was closely monitoring the heat output of customer racks in the data centre.

It capped co-location rack density at 2kW (although higher configurations were possible in separate caged areas) and served notices to customers whose racks caused "local heat problems" on parts of the data floor.

"After a few years you can almost estimate the number of Amps for a rack just by standing in front of it," said John Cafarella, AAPT's manager of field operations in Vic/Tas/WA/SA.

The telco had already shifted the ambient operating temperature for the majority of its data centres nationally from 21ºC to 23ºC as part of an sustainability initiative.

This was partly driven by arguments for greater efficiency and pressure from the continued rise in energy costs.

"We've seen a 20 percent increase in electricity costs this year alone," Yuile said.

"Obviously we've got to pass this onto customers. But do you do it, for example, as an energy levy? Personally I think the model has to shift in how we charge customers [for space]."

AAPT measured power down to the supply infrastructure level, taking measures including site and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) loads.

"If we did [the Richmond build] again, we'd put individual metering on each rack," Cafarella said.

"[AAPT] engineering is looking into it. But if you had a clean build you'd do it straight away."

Natural refresh cycles were also bringing more efficient plant into the centre.

Infrastructure sell

AAPT also plans to start testing virtual server and storage offerings mid-year in readiness for an infrastructure-as-a-service play to be launched later this year.

The service would be based non-exclusively on Sun hardware and VMware.

The strategy, according to Yuile, was two-fold: to attract customers and sell them telecommunications services, including cross-connects to other data centres and carriers.

"We will start as a company to offer infrastructure-as-a-service, to offer virtual server and storage capabilities," Yuile said.

"The virtualisation trend is continuing. We think more of our customers will become platform providers that are cloud-centric."