Sydney datacentres withstand heat wave

Datacentres in Sydney did not encounter any power failures or heavy demands on cooling infrastructure, say operators

Despite temperatures in Sydney hitting 45.8 degrees Celsius on 18 January, datacentres in the area did not encounter any power failures or heavy demands on cooling infrastructure, say operators.

According to a Fujitsu spokesperson, its facilities are designed to withstand a one-in-150 year heatwave event.

"Given accurate temperature records are approximately 75 to 100 years old, a theoretical value is calculated for a 1:150 event," the spokesperson said. "Friday's heatwave was closer to a 1-in-100 year event."

However, the spokesperson added that its North Ryde datacentre recorded temperature alerts for a couple of hours. No outages were sustained due to "good operational management".

Equinix Australia managing director Tony Simonsen said in a statement that the heatwave created "no additional challenges" for its three Sydney datacentres.

"Our buildings and infrastructure are designed and built to cope with extremes in weather conditions and every resource has redundancies in place," he said.

HP Asia Pacific and Japan ITO product marketing manager David Simpfendorfer also reported no issues at its Aurora facility in West Sydney.

According to Simpfendorfer, Aurora features state-of-the-art ventilation and cooling services, including air to air heat exchangers for the IT cells. This technology takes advantage of the West Sydney climate and reduces reliance on traditional condenser-based technology.

"We were able to quite easily manage last week's extreme weather conditions by utilising our multiple power and cooling distribution paths to combat the load and were able to continue to meet our customers' requirements as normal," he said.

Macquarie Telecom was also contacted for comment but did not respond at the time of writing.