Swedish designer and manufacturer of prefabricated data centre buildings Flexenclosure has entered in to a strategic partnership with Australian telecommunications provider Virtutel, with the intent to build up to 20 data centres across Australia.
The new facilities will be rolled out over the next three years in order to offer colocation and network services in presently underserved areas.
Virtutel through its subsidiary VirtuDC, will deploy the first of these facilities in Albury, New South Wales, followed by more in regional cities across Australia. This is in support of Virtutel’s commitment to establishing a mesh of interconnected carrier-neutral data centres covering the country — their strategy being to host IT infrastructure at the edge, thus lowering latency for existing applications and providing a platform for emerging technologies like Internet Of Things (IOT) and autonomous vehicles.
“We selected Flexenclosure for their deep experience in deploying prefabricated data centres in very challenging environments and their flexibility in making sure that the ultimate design was exactly what we wanted,” says David Allen, MD of Virtutel. “We are confident that Flexenclosure is the right partner for what is to be a significant rollout of IT infrastructure across Australia.”
Flexenclosure’s prefabricated eCentre data centres are state-of-the-art and they will be custom-designed and Uptime Institute Tier III certified. The base design will be standardised for all the new facilities, bringing significant operational efficiency benefits to Virtutel, particularly in the areas of power, cooling, UPS and ongoing management and maintenance.
Future expansion will be possible both horizontally and vertically and they will have ‘dark site’ functionality where required — unmanned and remotely managed from a central network operations centre.
Flexenclosure will also be providing ongoing data centre support services to Virtutel.
“We are delighted to establish this strategic partnership with Virtutel and excited to play a role in the execution of their vision for a new network of edge data centres in Australia,” says David King, CEO of Flexenclosure. “This also marks our entry into yet another new continent, further expanding our global footprint for our eCentre data centres.”