Fran Foo From: The Australian January 25, 2011 12:00AM
LEIGHTON Contractors has upped the ante in the data centre market, committing more than $50 million to an aggressive expansion plan aimed at capital cities.
It has secured at least 80,000sq m of land to develop data centre facilities that will rely on technology used by government cloud computing clients in Britain, and the operation that is rated the best green data centre in Europe.
Sites in Melbourne, Perth and Canberra have been secured, with selections under way in Adelaide and Sydney.
Plans are afoot to develop in Darwin, Hobart and Brisbane, despite the flood crisis.
"We've been working on our expansion program over the past two years and we're committed to investing in excess of $50m," said Malcolm Roe, general manager of Metronode, a Leighton Contractors division.
It has a 5000sq m site in Perth that will house 1200sq m of IT space.
In Melbourne, the site will cover 24,000sq m with a data centre area of 7000sq m.
The company will develop two locations in Canberra covering about 11,500sq m.
In Sydney, two plots of land -- of 17,000sq m and 19,000sq m -- will be developed.
Facilities in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra will be large-scale, 10-megawatt centres, while the rest will be less than 3MW.
The new data centres will cater for carbon-footprint-conscious organisations looking to manage their power bills.
Government and commercial clients were "desperate for data centres", Mr Roe said.
"But they don't just want space, they want solutions that are energy efficient and environmentally sound, so power consumption is under control," he said.
The company will roll out modular data centres based on Britain's BladeRoom technology by mid-year, starting with Melbourne and Perth, Mr Roe said.
BladeRoom was selected by Capgemini Britain for its Merlin data centre, which was judged the best green data centre in Europe at last year's Data Centre Leaders Awards.
The British Environment Agency was one customer that used Merlin, Capgemini global infrastructure outsourcing program director Paul Anderson said. Merlin is known to be one of the world's greenest data centres, with power usage effectiveness of 1.08.
PUE is a measure used to calculate the power efficiency of data centres.
Mr Roe said it was common to see local government data centres with a PUE of 2.5.
If a user ditched its traditional data centre for BladeRoom technology it could almost halve the power costs, he said. At 10c per kilowatt per hour, the annual savings could hit $1.4m.
"We will comply with Uptime Institute's tier 3 and tier 4 (where required) design standards for the rollout," Mr Roe said.
Leighton Contractors is one of four candidates shortlisted to consolidate 130 NSW government data centres into two sites.
It partnered with Springfield Land, better known for its Polaris data centres, as part of that bid.
Leighton has previously built data centre facilities for a range of clients, including the Defence Department, Optus and Westpac.
Data centres are all the rage at the moment in Australia -- more than $1 billion has been earmarked by the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Digital Realty, Equinix, Fujitsu and Global Switch to build new facilities.