NEXTDC brings Edge to Pilbara Desert with Vertiv
Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, has helped NEXTDC unlock new digital opportunities for Australia’s Pilbara region, delivering robust power and cooling infrastructure to its Port Hedland data centre. The new deployment supports the region’s need for robust data centre support to allow local government and industry to continue digitalisation growth and the adoption of AI.
NEXTDC provides colocation and connectivity services to Australian and international organisations. The company operates 16 data centre facilities throughout the country, with another five sites currently in the planning and development stages. NEXTDC is a leader in the industry in edge computing, extending sophisticated data centre capabilities beyond major urban areas and delivering foundational digital services to remote regions.
PH1 Port Hedland is NEXTDC’s Port Hedland data centre, located in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia, which services the port operations of local mining, oil and gas, and Federal Government sectors. Within the facility, Vertiv’s integrated modular data centre solutions operate close to the region’s Vocus telecommunications fibre network, helping to make cloud-based services - including AI and machine learning - available to NEXTDC’s PH1 Port Hedland customers.
Adam Gardner, Head of Product at NEXTDC, comments, “Before NEXTDC’s PH1 Port Hedland facility opened, data generated in the Pilbara often travelled 1,600 kilometres to Perth for processing. The high latency introduced by this extensive route introduced challenges for major resource organisations and other local industries. Innovative solutions, including those enabled by AI, frequently require low latency, reliable connectivity with real-time data access. These major Australian organisations turned to complex, bespoke point solutions to partially alleviate the digital proximity challenges, often at a significant cost to backhaul the data.
“NEXTDC’s PH1 empowers the region’s businesses and allows them to innovate and optimise like never before. Vertiv’s strength in Edge data centre builds - particularly in far-flung locations like Port Hedland - meant they were an ideal partner for NEXTDC’s in-house expertise. The Vertiv prefabricated infrastructure solution at PH1 optimised build time and was a great fit to service the region’s operational, safety, and productivity needs.”
Vertiv designed, procured, and implemented a complete prefabricated modular, rugged data centre for Stage 1 of the facility’s total capacity. The prefabricated approach allowed NEXTDC to overcome logistical issues because of the area’s remoteness, using capital city-built pre-engineered components and on-site standardised construction processes to reduce remote assembly costs and speed time to deployment. As a scalable, modular solution, the Vertiv deployment can be rapidly expanded to support additional growth. Meanwhile, the solution’s ruggedised design is tailored to withstand the Pilbara desert’s harsh environmental conditions.
“Standard data centre equipment isn’t usually specified for these conditions. Vertiv knew and understood this, and together, we made sure to use condensers appropriately rated at 55°C,” says NEXTDC Project Manager, Mark Hamilton. “Plus, we considered the facility’s resilience in the event of a cyclone. So, PH1 Port Hedland has tie-downs to steel fixings, appropriate to withstand high wind pressures, and includes substantive protection around critical equipment to endure a flying tree, should an event occur.
The modular solution is Tier III Uptime Institute-certified and uses refrigerant-based air cooling. It also promotes scalability, should NEXTDC introduce increasingly popular alternative liquid cooling methods. Other features include a high-efficiency UPS system, which supports the environment’s high-density power requirements, and lithium-ion batteries for longer-lasting power.
Mark adds, “We’re excited to have delivered a robust facility that will offer the Pilbara region access to technologies that improve how industries operate. Mining and oil and gas are big power consumers. As AI becomes more commonplace, these businesses can draw real-time data from their site operations and use it to identify more efficient methods of extracting resources or using trucks.”
The enablement of AI-driven, real-time data processing will play an even more prominent role amid NEXTDC’s second edge data centre build in the Pilbara region. NEXTDC’s NE1 Newman facility also leveraged the strong partnership between Vertiv and NEXTDC. Located 600km from Port Hedland and near several mines, the NE1 facility is almost identical to the PH1 facility with additional Stage 1 capacity. Mark notes, “This approach perfectly represents the modular and flexible nature of Vertiv’s prefabricated solutions: they are ready and able to service autonomous mines and other advanced programs.”
Tony Gaunt, Vice President of Asia at Vertiv, concludes, “NEXTDC is bringing metro-level compute modular data centres, complete with all the security, safety, low-latency, and uptime resilience that you would expect of a large data centre in a major city, to geographically dispersed and previously-isolated locations. Together, we’re making access to the major cloud providers the new status quo for Australia’s most prominent and founding industries and allowing local businesses to capitalise on AI technologies with high-speed connectivity.”
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Simon Rowley - 11 December 2024
