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Inside Harbour MSP's datacentre: photos

ZDNet Australia was invited inside Global Switch's datacentre facility based in Ultimo, Sydney, for a tour of the Harbour MSP suite, which houses Steam Engine's high performance computing gear.
By Luke Hopewell, Contributor
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1 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

Each of these hard disks stores 30 terabytes worth of data ranging from scientific analyses to files for films. These are four-year-old legacy drives and plans are in place to modernise the storage array.

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2 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

Three storage racks side by side. On the left are the legacy 30-terabyte disks and to the right are blue Hitachi arrays that can store 100 terabytes each.

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3 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

NetApp controller for the legacy hard disks.

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4 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

HP computational server nodes.

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5 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

This particular customer has brought in their own terabyte hard disk with some basic material to get the ball rolling on their project, avoiding having to bus it down via a network connection.

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6 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

Each rack is tightly secured.

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7 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

Networking facilities are run around the datacentre suite via overhead runners and cold air is forced under a two-foot raised floor.

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8 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

The business end of a front-end server.

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9 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

The area at the back of the racks is cooled by a variety of air-based methods. No liquid cooling method is employed by Steam Engine.

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10 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

Steam Engine's customers can install their various operating environments on these front-end servers to interface with the high-powered computing environment.

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11 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

Mike Smith is the project manager for Steam Engine and showed us around the rack space.

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12 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

The HP server nodes are cooled using forced air pushed from the front of the unit.

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13 of 13 Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia

The whole Harbour MSP suite is hooked up to an Inergen fire suppressant system to stave off disaster.

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