Tretecnic wins planning approval for new data centres

The company, which is led by a largely ex-Global Switch team, said it will develop a 9,000 square metre facility in Victoria and a 7,000 square metre centre in Canberra.

Both sites have already been acquired and contain existing buildings, which will be gutted and refitted as large capacity data centres, according to managing director Rob Kelly.

“We’ve spent $40 million to date in acquiring the buildings and doing the DAs,” Kelly told iTnews.

“You don’t spend that sort of money unless you’ve planned out the market opportunity.”

Kelly said the firm didn’t go to market specifically looking for sites with existing buildings.

“We just found they fulfilled every one of our criteria,” said Kelly.

“They’ll give us additional speed to market and it also means we’re not creating carbon to construct new facilities.”

Neither site has previously housed a data centre; Kelly said that was intentional because ‘the cost to retrofit is horrific’.

Tretecnic has learned the lessons of players like Exodus and will build out the facilities gradually. Not all of the square metre space will be devoted to data halls; some of it will likely be used for other services like secure storage, disaster recovery and for control rooms.

The Melbourne site also has an additional 2,500 square metres of office space attached to it, providing Tretecnic with another potentially lucrative revenue stream.

The data centre design itself is what Kelly calls ‘Tier 3 plus’. This, among other things, means it will predominately run at N+1 redundancy with pockets of 2N and ASIO T4 security depending on customer requirements.

Kelly described Tretecnic as a wholesale data centre space provider.

“We don’t have any intentions of going into the colo model but our customers will likely be selling colo services,” said Kelly.

“We’re not actively seeking the 1-3 rack customers. We’ll refer them to our customers.”

He also said that the potential for ambient cooling did not play a major factor in the location decisions.

“Climate didn’t play a factor,” said Kelly.