NextDC (ASX: NXT) has announced it is to open new data centres in Canberra and Perth as part of a push to develop a national Cloud computing footprint.
The 6,000m² Canberra data centre, formerly occupied by a major government agency, will provide high security under an ASIO-T4 physical security specification.
The facility, which also has two on-site power substations, is connected to fibre connections owned by Telstra, Optus and the Intra Government Communications Network (ICON).
The Perth data centre, yet to be built, will be based 11 kilometres northeast of Perth’s CBD. According to NextDC, the site is near a major electricity substation and has fibre optic infrastructure from Nextgen, Amcom, Optus and Telstra at the street.
The 8,000m² data centre facility is expected to feature 3,000m² of data halls offering high density technical space together with ancillary office and plant space in second half of 2012 calendar year.
The announcement of the Perth facility was [[artnid: 383905 |foreshadowed in April|new]]. Together with the Canberra facility the Perth facility marks the fifth acquisition in the company’s growing arsenal, complementing a completed centre in Brisbane, a facility under construction in Melbourne and plans to build in Macquarie Park, Sydney.
The combination of the proposed Perth and Canberra facilities would result in approximately 32 MW of capacity and 17,000m² of high density technical space.
According to NextDC chief executive officer, Bevan Slattery, the Canberra data centre in particular will capitalise on the Federal Government’s Cloud framework, due in December.
“Cloud providers are looking to service Federal Government agencies, ideally want to house their critical infrastructures in an independent, secure and well-connected data centre,” he said in a statement.
The Federal Government signalled in January that it would begin encouraging the use of Cloud-based services via the release of its draft cloud strategy paper. The paper is aimed at educating agencies on the delivery model and discuss potential future adoption for public-facing, unclassified services and information.
Earlier this month Slattery predicted NextDC may incur costs of "2.7 cents per kilo watt" at its Melbourne facility once the Gillard Government's carbon tax comes into affect on 1 July, 2012.
Speaking to Computerworld Australia, Slattery said the company's calculations suggested the carbon tax would create further incentives for the company and fellow data centre providers to pursue energy efficiency measures.
"An example of this is in Melbourne where we have designed our facility to reduce our energy consumption compared to traditional data centres, but we have also designed the later inclusion of generating our own low carbon energy through tri-generation plants on site," he said.
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