Qld's Stanwell plans new datacentres

Queensland state-owned energy supplier Stanwell Corporation this week revealed plans to build two new Tier 3 datacentres; plans that should be upgraded, according to one analyst.

The energy supplier has issued a tender for two high security and high availability datacentres, which are expected to be isolated to the extent that no "act of god" could impact both at the same time. Bidders are expected to meet availability requirements laid out in the Uptime Institute's White Paper for Tier 3 datacentres.

A key objective is to comply with financial regulations it is subject to under the Australian Financial Services Licence.

But Sam Higgins, research director of Queensland-based analyst house Longhaus said the datacentres should be built to the highest security specifications possible, Tier 4, and could be used to address what he said was the state's disaster recovery deficit and pare back its reliance on unrated datacentres within state government and state-owned corporations.

Sam Higgins, research
director, Longhaus
(Credit: Longhaus)

"A Tier 4 regional facility could be used as a honey pot for further government agency datacentre consolidation in Queensland's northern regions, not to mention a geographically remote site for disaster recovery of metropolitan services which is sorely required in the Queensland market," he said.

Datacentre consolidation within state government had originally been on Queensland's cards under its 2006 Service Delivery and Performance Commission's report into ICT use by the Queensland Government. The report highlighted over 100 unrated datacentres that were being individually managed by agencies.

Higgins said that consolidation of the Queensland Government regional datacentres and regional disaster recovery had been left out of scope of the Technology Transformation Program.

"In our view the Stanwell project offers a unique opportunity for the local ICT industry to seed fund a top quality regional datacentre in North Queensland whose space could then be used to address these two outstanding issues of regional datacentre consolidation and disaster recovery for the benefit of both the regional ICT industry and Queensland government and its owned corporations like Stanwell," he said.

Tenders are expected to be submitted by 15 May with a view to gain final approval for the project by 26 June 2009.