New green Data Centre to be built at Caulfield Campus

The University recently announced the approval of $11 million to build a state-of-the-art green data centre located in B block at Caulfield campus. The existing data centres are over 30 years old and showing their age in many different ways.

The new 500 square metre data centre will house 200 racks accounting for around 50 percent of Monash IT data centre equipment. The centre will increase Monash’s capacity to cater for additional research and shared services needs while employing the latest efficiencies in ‘green’ data centre design, equipment selection and running.

The goal of the project is to deliver a high availability data centre based on energy efficient technologies, with sufficient capacity to meet the foreseeable needs of the University.

This will be achieved by:

• Using an innovative rack layout design that will prevent the hot air from the back of each rack mixing with the cold air required in the front. This will greatly reduce the volume of cold air needed to be supplied throughout the centre.

• Using energy efficient air conditioning, which uses cool air from outside when available and captures the hot exhaust air, using it to warm other parts of the building.

• Using lighting control which turns lights off when no one is in the centre therefore reducing energy use.

• Using 50 percent less batteries in the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) backup systems thanks to efficient configuration and design layout.

• Using the latest insulation to ensure the data centre experiences minimal impact from outside temperature fluctuations.

• Using new energy efficient servers and virtual servers. This plays a major role by contributing up to 50 percent of the total potential energy savings.

Future green readiness

The potential use of alternative power sources such as solar power and turbine power, which are not presently cost effective to install, are being considered in the design, making the data centre ‘future ready’ for when these technologies become viable.

Demolition work is planned to begin early 2008 with the new green data centre expected online around mid year 2009.