Data Centre Overview
EDC is a leading provider of Tier 3 data centres in Australia, evidenced by its recent selection on the Federal Government Data Centre Facilities Panel to provide data centres to its agencies.
EDC is investing in a new data centre expansion in Sydney and Melbourne.
A reliable and robust data centre depends on:
1. Location
2. Design
3. Long-term power availability
Above: 5.8 MW data centre expansion well underway
EDC's data centres in Sydney and Melbourne are safely located outside the 15km ‘CBD Radius of Risk’ zone to address the above challenges.
Location
Historically organisations have built data centres or co-located IT infrastructure near the CBD or their offices for easy access. This trend has reversed with corporations and managed service providers placing data centres outside high risk zones, having learnt the lessons from recent terrorist activities, environmental congestion and natural disasters.
"The data centres I've seen in Australia seem to be located in cities, which is a concern. You don't even need an explosion to create disaster — all you need is some incident and you cannot get into your data centre."
Harry Archer, head of security practice for BT Australia
The problems associated with locating data centres in or within 15km with the CBD were addressed by UK and US government and businesses in response to 9/11. Australia is now following suit with corporations relocating critical IT infrastructure outside the CBD radius of risk.
Design and Tier Ratings
Data centre designs were traditionally based on Tier ratings – where the higher the tier rating, the more resilient the data centre. Now data centre designs encompass a more holistic set of considerations; for example, relying on dual power feeds from separate power grids are no longer safe enough, The Uptime Institute calls these feeds from energy providers as "unreliable power”, with power interruption likely to increase over the next ten years.
EDC’s new data centre design is influenced by world-leading data centre design where design that increases redundancy is giving way to design that is smart, simple and pushes the PUE boundaries.
Power availability
Energy authorities are struggling to meet increased short-term demand for power required by data centres . Building new power substations does not solve the issue, as doing so is cost-prohibitive with lengthy lead times, and includes the same problem facing data centres in finding suitable locations and running expensive power feeds from multiple grids through densely populated areas.
What is causing these problems?
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Average rack power draw is rapidly increasing with virtualisation
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Breakdown in communication is occurring between business, IT and facilities management
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Energy authorities supply cannot meet demand for power
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Data centres are situated in the wrong locations, impacted by limited power and infrastructure security risks.
Your data centre has a crucial role to play in the smooth running of your organisation’s operations. Having data centres located in a safe location with ample power and efficiency is the foundation of all future data centre requirements.
EDC has considered all these critical elements to ensure our clients have peace of mind their business are functional 24x7 as demands placed on cloud computing increases with power and space available that can easily scale.