NSW Government expands Silverwater data centre

The New South Wales Government has launched the second stage of its state-of-the-art Silverwater data centre.

Minister for Finance and Services Dominic Perrottet said the expansion of the facility will pave the way for 130 of the state’s ageing data centres to be consolidated into the centre and its sister site at Unanderra.

Agencies from all major government departments have already started to migrate their systems over to the new data centres, he said.

The Silverwater data centre was constructed by Nextgen’s data centre business Metronode as part of a $182 million capacity contract awarded in May 2012. The first-stage site commenced operation in July last year, and the Unanderra centre launched a month later.

The 16,800 m² facility already has Tier III certification from the Uptime Institute. When fully built, it will be capable of supporting up to 9 MW of IT load.

Metronode said the facility has been designed with ecological efficiency in mind and can provide a 90% reduction in power required for cooling.

It use direct free air-cooling to achieve a power utilisation efficiency of under 1.2, compared with conventional data centres that can have a score higher than 2.2.

Metronode also announced it has won the Uptime Institute Brill Awards for Efficient IT for its Sydney 2 and Illawarra 1 facilities.

The two data centres are among 15 facilities worldwide to receive the awards, which aim to recognise exceptional IT operational efficiency in capital deployment, technology, design and management. The facilities launched last year.

Metronode has, to date, built four data centres based on the BladeRoom modular design and is preparing to build a fifth in Canberra.

Pictured: Minister for Finance and Services Dominic Perrottet at the Silverwater data centre.