Macquarie Data Centres and Macquarie Government, part of Macquarie Telecom Group, have announced the launch of Intellicentre 5 (IC5) in Canberra, purpose-built to house the most highly classified Australian Government workloads.
The $17 million ‘bunker’ data centre is located alongside Macquarie’s adjacent Intellicentre 4 (IC4). The new facility offers further capacity for Government cloud workloads and an additional secure facility to back up data.
The combined 4-megawatt (MW) facilities leverage a Tier IV, SCEC Zone 5 ready data centre, supported by over 150 NV1 government-cleared engineers – a 25 per cent increase in cyber security engineers since construction commenced in July 2020.
“Data and cloud demand has skyrocketed as the pandemic continues to bring forward years’ worth of IT and digital transformation projects,” said David Hirst, Group Executive, Macquarie Data Centres. “Ensuring that data remains secure, sovereign and within Australia’s borders is vital to protecting our national security and privacy interests – this facility embodies that need in every way.”
The launch follows the "on-time and on-budget" completion of IC5 in December 2020 despite challenges including COVID-19 lockdowns, travel restrictions, and record rainfall in Canberra during October. The project also contrasts with the overall decline in data centre infrastructure spend last year, which research has found reduced by 10.4 per cent in 2020.
Macquarie worked with Australian construction company Manteena on IC5. The build involved four kilometres of underground electrical conduit, 15 tons of copper in the main cables, and generators powerful enough to run 400 homes. Queanbeyan company SRA Solutions provided data centre racks for IC5.
IC5 has also been fitted with a five-ton solar rooftop installation to maintain an industry leading power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.35.
Macquarie’s Government business supports more than 42 per cent of Australian Federal and State government agencies and personnel with cyber security, secure internet gateway (SIG) and cloud services.
Intellicentre 5 (IC5) in Canberra is purpose-built to house the most highly classified Australian Government workloads. (Supplied)
