Polaris Data Centre

Springfield Central, Queensland

The Polaris Data Centre reached practical completion on 30 January 2009, and is widely regarded as Australia’s leading, most modern, highly secure, purpose-built, Tier 3+ data centre. The facility is unique in delivering an N+2, high availability solution that is reinforced with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) assuring a class leading 99.99% availability.
The Tier 3+ rating demonstrates a concurrently maintainable, high security, high availability (N+2) facility that is successfully meeting the requirements of tenants including Suncorp-Metway, Queensland State Government, Ipswich City Council, EDS, Queensland Gas, NEC Australia and Pipe Networks.
Location
Greater Springfield is a fully master planned city located in South East Queensland.
Significant private and public expenditure over the next five years will see significant improvement in travel options with highway extensions, duplications and a new rail link connecting with the City Train network.
The heart of Greater Springfield is it’s CBD, Springfield Central, which lies 26 km from the Brisbane CBD and 17 km from the Ipswich CBD.
Existing highways link Brisbane (30mins), Brisbane Airport (45mins), Ipswich CBD (15mins) and the Gold Coast (1 hour).
Polaris Data Centre is located within Parkside, the CBD’s smart business precinct.
Some of the key benefits offered by Polaris include:

• High efficiency power and cooling systems that deliver significant green IT benefits due to the design, overall scale of the facility and associated infrastructure;
• A direct sub-lease with the Landlords that enables direct access to the Polaris SLA;
• Use of a facility that was purpose designed and built to deliver a DSM compliant Intruder Resistant Perimeter capable of supporting up to TOP SECRET zones;
• Monitoring electricity usage down to the rack level , and deliver separate and related metering,
• Deliver high levels of resilience through a Tier 3+, truly concurrently maintainable site with an N+2 redundancy configuration.

The Polaris Data Centre:

• Is a 14,000m2 purpose-built, Tier 3+, high security facility delivering 6,993m2 of raised floor over three levels;
• Uses biometric man-traps on main entries to all raised floor areas, with full digital CCTV surveillance and logging;
• Provides a scalable, redundant power and cooling capacity ranging from an average 800W/m2 to 1500W/m2, with support for high-density rack solutions up to 60kW/rack;
• Delivers N+N power and N+2 cooling as the base configuration to all raised floor areas;
• Can optionally deliver high availability (2N) cooling solutions for high density pods;
• Provides high floor loading support with 1600kg/m2 slabs and 1500kg/m2 raised floors;
• Delivers high-availability power and cooling with a design nominal 99.999% availability, and contracted SLA for 99.99%;
• Provides UPS support for all critical cooling infrastructure (chillers and related pumps);
• Delivers an N+1 redundant fire suppression system (inert gas based) with VESDA detection;
• Redundant Building Management System (BMS) and Security Access Control systems;
• Uses four vertical riser pods for the redundant delivery of power, water, communications and fire detection, with each service fire separated from the other in each pod;
• Maintains 48 hours onsite storage of diesel and water in the event of mains power or water failures respectively;
• Provides a two-stage secure loading bay and truck trap;
• Is manned 24×7 by Security and Facilities Management staff;

The Polaris Tier 3+, concurrently maintainable N+2 design has been reviewed and independently audited in regards to the security and availability requirements of a major banking / financial institution, an Australian State Government, and other multinational organisations.
Through carriers including Pipe Networks, AAPT and NextGen, a diverse, cost effective, high-bandwidth carriage solution is available.
The key differentiator of the Polaris Data Centre is that the facility was purpose designed and built – from the size and shape of the floors, the slab loadings, number of vertical risers, physical security perimeter, bullet resistant glass around security offices, to the size, capacity and truly concurrent maintainable configuration of the core power and cooling infrastructure. Existing building limitations did not influence or limit the design, capacity, scalability and flexibility of the Polaris Data Centre.