Telarus to build Melbourne data centre

Telarus will build a new enterprise-grade data centre in Melbourne to escape the current shortage of available carrier- and vendor-neutral space and support future service launch plans.

The new facility will house approximately 200 racks and will operate as a separate venture and business entity.

The company currently leases space in the AAPT data centre in Richmond and at GlobalCentre in South Melbourne.

Telarus managing director, Jules Rumsey, told iTnews that potential locations and configurations were yet to be confirmed.

“We’re seeing a lot of requirements to get rack densities up to 5-10 kiloWatts, so we obviously want to design the new centre for what’s coming rather than the here and now,” said Rumsey.

“The build may even be two stage process where we construct two facilities in diffrent areas, which then also gives us the capacity to use one for disaster recovery.”

Rumsey also said the company would look at how to make the new facility or facilities as energy efficient as possible.

“We will probably use some overhead supplemental chillers in the centre,” he said.

“We are also considering free cooling but there’s only certain portions of the year where it makes sense.

“We’re still actively considering it but we’d have to see how the number savings stacked up before we make a decision,” said Rumsey.

Free cooling is gaining interest from local data centre operators, particularly those based in colder climates, as a way to reduce the use of chillers in their environments.

One of Telarus’s major new initiatives driving the need for more space is the launch of a virtual hosting platform, which is backed by IBM BladeCentre servers, an EMC Clariion SAN and VMware’s ESX.

The solution will act as a sort of ‘specialised cloud’ offering, said Rumsey.

“With virtualisation and blade technology coming into the mainstream, the heat load in a small footprint is quite significant,” he added.

Australian data centre construction has been booming in recent months, with Fujitsu’s new centre in Sydney and a promised facility in Perth ; Galileo Connect’s local and regional plans ; and the Polaris development near Brisbane .