Tourism commission powers up data centre
- 31 July, 2003 08:30
As part of a six-month infrastructure overhaul, the Australian Tourism Commission has implemented rackmounted uninterruptible power supplies in its Sydney data centre.
The commission’s IT&T manager Allan Woods said the initial driver for the project was to provide extra space in the data centre as it was quickly “shrinking”.
“[With] decent, consistent racking we wouldn’t need to expand our computer room,” Woods said. “Also, our old UPS was coming to its end of life.”
Woods said the commission selected APC’s new InfrastruXure UPS hardware for a number of reasons.
“APC’s UPS systems are contained in standard racks so we now have one rack for the batteries and one rack for the power distribution units,” he said.
“This makes cooling the units easy, and with its browser-based monitoring and control, management is also simple.”
The new UPS system provides conditional power to the some 30 servers in the data centre.
“The system is connected to the building’s generator, which is appropriate,” Woods said. “We have about 10 minutes of uptime availability in the event of an outage.”
Supporting about 100 users in Australia, the commission’s infrastructure is mainly Windows on Dell, with Sun and Oracle for financials.
“APC was directly involved in installing the equipment and did a good job,” Woods said. “Uninterruptible power is something you have to have. It’s incredibly important but boring.”
Although reluctant to disclose the amount spent on the implementation, Woods said the cost is justified.
“APC is premium kit and you get what you pay for,” he said. “If you acknowledge the importance of power control it is cost effective. It was the right fit for the size of our organisation.”
Woods said redundancy needs to be considered in terms of business requirements.
“For our business, uptime is important but we are not running a high-transaction environment so multiple levels of redundancy are not required,” he said.