Perth-headquartered data centre operator Red Cloud has finalised the purchase of a site for its new Tasmanian data centre.
The company has announced that it purchased a 7000 square metre site in the SPARK Business Hub in the Hobart suburb of Cambridge. Red Cloud said it expects the $40 million data centre to create 80 job during construction and an additional 17 roles when it is operation. The target completion data for the data centre is September 2017.
“We will be building our data centre to comply with and be accredited by The Uptime Institute to Tier III standard, enabling Tasmanian ICT companies to access the best supporting infrastructure,” Red Cloud CEO Carl Woodbridge said in a statement.
“We had initially anticipated acquiring an existing industrial building that would be repurposed as a data centre, however we were unable to find a suitable building that fulfilled all of the requirements of our extensive 100+ check point,” the company’s state manager for Tasmania, David Combes, said.
“SPARK Business Hub was able to satisfy all of our selection criteria including our power, high speed data requirements as well as our specific requirement for a redundant power feed to the site.”
The facility will have a modular design based on technology from UK company Cannon Technologies.
Tasmania’s IT and innovation minister, Michael Ferguson, said the facility will be part of the ‘Tasmanian Cloud’ project, alongside TasmaNet and TasNetworks.
In December, the state government released its Data Centre Action Strategy, which sets out a plan to attract data centre operators to Tasmania.
“Tasmania is ideally placed from both a domestic and international perspective through possessing a competitively priced, robust and reliable power system, with over 90 per cent generated from renewable energy sources (hydro and wind),” the document states.
“This is even more attractive when considering that Hydro Tasmania also could potentially write contracts with large data centre companies for 100 per cent renewable energy.”
“Over the coming years, the Tasmanian Government will work with sector and foreign direct investment experts to understand global data centre trends and activities and identify and target national and international data centre investment opportunities,” the strategy states.