Fujitsu delivers centralised datacentre for universities

Three major Victorian universities have selected Fujitsu to supply a shared datacentre to help save money and the environment.

Under the terms of the contract, Fujitsu will construct an additional data hall onto an existing datacentre that will house the central facilities of the University of Melbourne, Monash University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Fujitsu will be responsible for maintenance and security for a minimum of 10 years, with two five-year optional extensions.

According to the University of Melbourne CIO, Sendur Kathir, Fujitsu won the deal in a tender process started 12 months ago. The new datacentre will have a Tier-3 rating, a PUE rating of between 1.5 and 1.7 and may use a hydrogen fuel cell as part of its power source.

“All three of us were looking to invest in datacentres and we decided it would be sensible from several perspectives to try and collaborate to get a common outcome,” he said. “The sustainable elements of the datacentre were of paramount importance and we gave that very heavy weighting.

“With the way the ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme] is likely to pan out in the future, we felt we wouldn’t necessarily have the expertise needed to deal with the complexities that would arise in the future.

“Fujitsu will now be contractually responsible for ensuring that its compliance to carbon emission regulations are met.”

But environmental savings aside, Kathir said the economics of the deal also made sense.

“We believe the saving to our university will be around 10 per cent per annum as compared to if we had gone it alone,” Kathir said. “It’ll be in the range of about $200,000 per annum.”

Each university will also maintain individual co-located datacentres on campus.

“We have an existing datacentre that is currently in operation and will continue to be in operation and we are planning on building another 500sqm that will come online in the next two years,” he said. “Most of the management is now done remotely, but there are separately caged areas for each of the universities to gain access.”

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