Victoria scores $200m Polaris datacentre
The owners of the Brisbane Polaris datacentre, Springfield Land Corporation, will branch out and build a $200 million facility in Melbourne, with work scheduled to start in July.
The datacentre in Brisbane (Credit: Polaris)
The company's original Brisbane facility is close to full, according to Springfield Land corporation managing director Bob Sharpless, following its wins with the National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co) and AAPT. Other tenants include Suncorp, NEC, Citec, Ipswich City Council and Queensland and Australian government departments.
The new Brisbane centre, which had received interest from overseas investors, will be built on a 1.2 hectare greenfields site in Western Melbourne suburb Derimut, which will create jobs in the region, according to Sharpless.
The datacentre will be five storeys, with the 14,000 square metre building set to hold 7000 square metres of raised floor technical area, according to Springfield Land Corporation datacentre executive Chris Schroor. It will be able to accommodate IT loads of up to 10 megawatts and provide point solutions for racks up to 60 kilowatts.
The company is already in "advanced states" of negotiations with anchor tenants, Sharpless said, which are to be announced in the coming weeks. It's spruiking its security and green credentials, with features to include biometric fingerprint scanners, bullet-proof glass and man traps.
The datacentre will be both a primary and secondary facility, operating as a disaster recovery site, internet datacentre and carrier interconnect exchange, according to Sharpless.
"It will not only protect Melbourne's key IT infrastructure services, it will also host mission-critical ICT systems for corporate enterprises and government departments," he said.
He pointed to Polaris' uptime during the Queensland floods, saying that its geographical location had helped it to avoid outages.
"The Polaris datacentre in Queensland remained operational and accessible by road throughout the Brisbane floods because of Springfield's ideal geographical location and we are taking a similarly long-term approach in Victoria," he said.
"Polaris is perfectly positioned close to one of Australia's major financial hubs, but far enough away so that should disaster strike in the Melbourne CBD it will remain online."
Every component in the building was backed up three times, according to Sharpless.
However, Polaris' record hasn't always been perfect, with botched scheduled maintenance on a generator wreaking havoc on many of its customers in March.