Written by Claire Sangster - State Manager, Western Australia
Perth has always been a great place to live and work. With the development of NEXTDC’s new world-class data centre P2 Perth in the CBD nearing completion, it’s an exciting time as we gear up to take a quantum leap forward in the attraction of Western Australia as a region to invest and do business.
This new hyperscale cloud data centre, which will open for business in July, is not the first significant investment that NEXTDC has made in WA. Our first generation P1 facility in Malaga is a critically important piece of infrastructure for the local economy and has been successfully servicing local, interstate and international organisations since 2014.
As the WA economy grows, it was important for us to continue building our presence in Western Australia. We recognised the need to service the CBD and provide geographically diverse solutions to support the elevated resilience requirements of local customers. About 18 months ago, we expanded our horizon in Perth and began planning a new second generation data centre, P2, which would deliver the new cloud and connectivity infrastructure that was needed to support the growing needs of the West Australian community and economy.
P2 has been designed and built to exceed global data centre body Uptime Institute’s Tier IV standards. This is the highest level of certification available for data centre security, resilience and reliability, all critical success factors for today’s digital businesses.
P2 will deliver over 12,000m2 of technical space, and 20MW of much needed capacity to WA’s digital economy. With P1 and P2 being 13km apart and connected by diverse dedicated fibre networks, collectively they have sufficient geographic separation to support the essential risk management requirements for local organisations around redundancy, back-up and disaster recovery.
Exponential data growth
In the 21st century, digital infrastructure is fundamental to economic development. You can’t have one without the other. Digital transformation is a global phenomenon. Prior to 2016, only 10% of the world’s current data existed. Industry analysts tell us that the amount of data in existence is doubling every 18 months as consumers and enterprises embrace smart devices, digital processes, and cloud computing.
With this exponential growth in the creation and application of data, the quality of the infrastructure in place becomes the foundation upon which economic growth can be sustained.
During this ongoing digital transformation journey, enterprises have come to understand how important resilience, security and connectivity to cloud platforms and IT services are to the survivability of their business in an environment that is experiencing an accelerated rate of change.
Built for resilience, security and innovation
P2 will be one of only a few data centres in the Asia Pacific region that have achieved Tier IV certification for Constructed facility and Gold certification for Operational Sustainability. What this means for our customers is that we guarantee them 100% uptime of the critical infrastructure that supports their technology investments.
Due to its geographic isolation, Perth was built on a history of self-sufficiency, sustainability and innovation and that has carried forth into the digital era. We are seeing continual growth in demand from local organisations and Government as well as the resources sector as they embrace the opportunities that cloud and digital transformation introduces to cut costs, improve productivity, and differentiate through disruption and innovation.
As an example, mining and exploration companies rely on complex digital infrastructure with predictable, high speed bandwidth to manage the enormous amount of telemetry data that enables their autonomous vehicles and remote locations.
We also support multiple organisations in the Higher Education segment. Not only do they face enormous imperatives to secure their infrastructure from accidental data loss or malicious breaches, but they also need agility and flexibility to create outstanding digitalised learning experiences and rapidly respond to competitive disruption.
For any organisation facing the same challenges are to meet their mission critical health and safety or data security compliance obligations, they need the best possible digital infrastructure. They also need to be in close proximity to the cloud platforms that are supporting their needs for agility, flexibility, and innovation.
Supporting communities
Meanwhile, local Government agencies face significant challenges in delivering quality public services in the face of enormous geographic diversity. Digital transformation introduces a range of new opportunities for Government to reduce costs, extend accessibility to services and improve governance around the usage of taxpayers’ funds but quality infrastructure is essential to advancing that agenda.
World class digital infrastructure is crucial to the growth trajectory of the WA economy. Our communities need and deserve the highest level of design, engineering and operational expertise to be applied so that our customers don’t have to invest in that themselves. Instead they can focus on innovation that advances their organisational objectives and meets their service delivery and risk management expectations.
Running parallel to this increasing dependence on quality infrastructure to achieve positive business outcomes is a push from executive level management to reduce the environmental footprint of their in-house data centres. Our customers regularly express the importance of reducing their carbon footprint and improving the resilience of their technology systems. This aligns perfectly to NEXTDC’s commitment to sourcing renewable energy wherever possible, the application of innovative operational processes to achieve the lowest possible power usage and being able to guarantee 100% uptime.
Resilience is a fundamental success factor in a digital-first era. Digital infrastructure has to always be available, secured at the highest standards to protect their IP or customer data and it needs to be intimately connected to their remote sites, services providers and operational teams with appropriate attention to resilience, bandwidth, latency and redundancy.
Connected to Asia and the East Coast
In addition to NEXTDC’s investment in WA, there have also been a couple of significant material infrastructure changes domestically that will work in tandem with our data centres to compound the improvement of digital experiences and opportunities for the local economy.
Two brand new high capacity, high-speed submarine cable networks have been completed connecting Perth to south-east Asia and Sydney, routes that embed the region into the global digital economy.
This is allowing a number of international organisations to bring infrastructure out of Asia and invest in Australia to support their local customers with much better performing applications based closer to users. Similarly, these networks, supported by world-class colocation data centres, will give WA organisations accelerated opportunities to trade, partner and compete globally.
Reach out to NEXTDC to find out more about how P2 can advance your digital transformation objectives and better connect you nationally and globally.
