TECH FORTRESS
IT CAN WITHSTAND FIRE, FLOOD AND POWER OUTAGES AND IT’S GOING TO DRIVE GROWTH HERE
A TECHNOLOGICAL fortress designed to withstand fire, flood and catastrophic power loss is taking shape on Toowoomba’s outskirts.
The Pulse Data Centre is a “highly resilient” facility, says project manager Peter Blunt, capable of storing government and corporate data while protecting it from theft, sabotage and natural disasters.
Windowless and built with 15cm-thick concrete walls, the centre will be able to keep running even if a fire breaks out and meets security specifications set by Australia’s spy agency, ASIO.
These include digital surveillance, multi-factor authentication, traps and biometric measures.
Mr Blunt detailed some of the $40-million project’s features at a business breakfast hosted by the Toowoomba Chamber of Commerce yesterday.
He said the goal was to ensure the building was always operational, no matter the emergency.
“We will maintain the facility and make sure it never stops,” he said of the FKG Group’s building at Wellcamp.
“Each (section is) a concrete bunker and they’re all two-hour fire rated, which means you can have a fire burning there for two hours and it won’t move outside.
“The intention is you can have something go wrong anywhere in the facility and we can isolate that part of it.
“We might have to turn that particular part off, but the rest of the facility continues to operate.”
Mr Blunt said the anti-fire measures in Pulse required FKG to apply to the Queensland Fire and Emergency Service to implement new protocols.
“We have special bottled gas which discharges and it actually extinguishes the fire,” he said.
Pulse DC, which is essentially three different data centres connected by one central security hub, could house hundreds of millions of dollars in servers and digital technology from companies in Toowoomba and across the nation.
Along with the existing security measures guaranteed to all clients, Mr Blunt said the building could be upgraded to meet special criteria, up to ASIO-T4 levels.
“If a government department would need to store data, we can customise our data centre’s security measures,” he said.
“It’s something we would do over and above what is usually required.
“The government has specific requirements about the types of locks, the thickness of the door, the construction of the concrete. It’s a very prescriptive standard.”
Mr Blunt said the 4380sq m floor space was already filling up, with clients from Toowoomba and across Australia signing onto the first facility of its kind in regional Australia.
“Our demand comes from a whole variety of areas. Locally, it’s been fantastic – local businesses have engaged with us,” he said.
“There’s been commitments from all the major players in town – all of them have committed to this facility, for various reasons.
“We’re already getting some good responses out of Queensland-based businesses in Brisbane (and) we’ve had strong national and international interest for the facility.”
The data centre is expected to be finished by mid-February, but it won’t be opened for another month while independent experts run tests and experiment to check the facility’s security, consistency and reliability.
Construction started in June.