HP's flashy new Sydney facility is the company's second core data centre for the country and a new base for its regional cloud initiatives.
The facility, based at Eastern Creek in Sydney's west, covers an approximate 134,000 square metres of land. It will hold up to 12,500 square metres of technical floorspace once fully complete.
The company claims high security for the data centre, built to Government standards. Employees are subject to two-factor and biometric authentication for entry, and are highly scrutinised on roles-based access. The facilities manager was unable to show media around some parts of the facility without security personnel.
The site fails over to Global Switch's Ultimo data centre, but HP claims that will never happen – the first building has five generators for backup, only two of which are required to operate the building at full load.
The site, from afar. No VISA-style moat, unfortunately.
The entrance to the facility.
The building is built to purpose, meaning high ceilings and large corridors. It also boasts 300 square metres of staging space, allowing customers and HP alike to test customer infrastructure before introducing it to the live environment.
The facility works on a custom hot aisle containment system that largely does away with traditional raised floor setups in favour of a straight concrete slab and overhead cabling.
The data hall is split into pods, each of which is locked and secured.
The facility runs at an ambient temperature of around 24 degrees, returning air in the hot aisle of up to 32 degrees.
Each data hall fits 750 racks at an average density of four kilowatts, but can go up to ten kilowatts at scale.
The data centre roof hosts the facility's five generators, air conditioning units and air scrubbers, which are used to clean the ambient air for entry. Pictured: General manager of HP Enterprise Services, Alan Bennett.
According to facilities manager Joseph Smith, the cooling systems were stress-tested by pumping three megawatts of heat into the air conditioning units.
No chilled water is used, but a refrigerant is kept on hand for those hot western Sydney days.
HP plans to build two of its own substations on site, in hopes of producing enough power to serve the entire needs of the facility.
The 'Aurora'.
Suave offices, right next to the mantrap entrance to the facility.
HP's flashy new Sydney facility is the company's second core data centre for the country and a new base for its regional cloud initiatives.