FirstMac, an Australian-based wholesale residential mortgage provider, has announced it is to construct a new data center for its financial transaction servers. The new build will accommodate 40 blade servers and help overcome the power and cooling restrictions of its existing computer room.
The motivation for building the new data center included having a facility that had sufficient clean power and cooling facility for maintaining five-nines' uptime with blade server racks. The solution, which was provided by Emerson Network Power Australia and implemented by Power Quality Consultants, includes two Liebert NXa uninterruptible power systems (UPS) rated at 40kVA, a dual-bus redundant configuration, and two Liebert PeX computer room air conditioners for precision climate control.
Emerson Network's national product manager, Mark Deguara, said business-critical continuity depends on many factors including product quality and configuration and data centre design. "At FirstMac the UPSs are installed in such a way that if one fails - or more commonly be taken offline for routine maintenance - the other would still provide full protection and clean power for the server farm," Deguara said.
"Likewise the precision coolers work on a weekly duty cycle, meaning one unit provides all the necessary cooling for the room for one week, then switches over to the backup unit, which then becomes the primary unit for that week. "This arrangement means FirstMac is fully protected from any outages to its infrastructure, which is fundamental when you consider that the infrastructure is largely responsible for maintaining server uptime."