[LINK] Federal CIO rules out super data centre

[Tom Worthington]

At 03:55 PM 13/05/2009, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>... Remember TomW's prediction made back in January:
>
>   The 10,000 m2 ... of large government data centre space the Gershon
>   Report found in Canberra, will be reduced to about 100m2.
>
>I don't see evidence of any reduction so far, never mind to 100m2. ...

It happens that I had a tour of Canberra Data Centres (CDC) new 
facility in Canberra on Tuesday 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/05/green-data-centre-in-canberra.html>.

This is a commercial data center set up to host government and 
non-government computer systems. It is located in a converted 
warehouse in an industrial park. Apart from the emphasis on green 
computing and security, what is most impressive about this facility 
is that it is open for business and is servicing clients already, 
unlike some other proposals.

CDC are using water cooling and so can cater for ultra high density 
blade servers. With this you could fit a very large amount of 
computing power into a small space. But that would not necessarily be 
cost effective, or logistically a good idea. As the GCIO says, the 
government would need to have a number of data centres in different 
locations for security and reliability reasons.

Also keep in mind that my 100m2 estimate was based on rationalizing 
ICT across the government, not just sticking all the existing 
inefficiently designed, duplicated systems into one data center.

I have suggested CDC offer a service where full backup power is not 
required. One side effect of  web based applications and power 
efficient servers is that you don't have to run the system at full 
power all the time. As a result, you could throttle the system back 
to use less power when mains power is not available.

More on this at: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/10/canberra-technology-city-proposed.html>



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University