A peek inside NextDC’s S2 data centre
NextDC let ZDNet inside its second of three facilities in Sydney. Here’s a look at the 30MW facility located in Macquarie Park, 13 kilometres north-west of the Sydney CBD. ...
Last week, ZDNet was invited on a tour of Pacnet's recently expanded Tier III Sydney CBD datacentre.
As a Tier III datacentre, the Pacnet facility has an uptime service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.99 percent. In order to fulfil this SLA, the datacentre's disaster recovery system consists of a triple substation onsite to pair with the generators. The substations are linked to several active and passive uninterruptable power supply (UPS) systems, which are run in a chain wherein if one fails, the power goes to another. There are seven generators on the roof to provide in the event of power from the substation going out. The datacentre is on the city grid, meaning a significant portion of Sydney CBD would have to lose power for the substation to be affected.
"It's about how many nines of availability you can achieve ... what we are now getting into is the business applications — emails, CRM, databases — which are kind of sitting in the level three capability of four nines of availability; effectively, it's less than an hour of downtime in a year ... this is all achieved through software, not hardware," said Atul Thapar, managing director of E-Bit Systems.
The datacentre facility has multi-layered security, with a card swipe, fingerprint recognition (above), and surveillance cameras installed.
Caption by: Corinne Reichert
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