The annual Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit was this year held from March 10-12 at the Gold Coast Marriot Resort & Spa, offering attendees a smorgasbord of over 40 keynotes, roundtables, collaborative think-tanks, 1-1 meetings, exhibition and workshops.
A theme of this years’ Summit is the challenge posed by a shifting landscape of increasingly complex and dynamic architectures: “In the face of ever-increasing capacity, latency, availability and demands, most large enterprise and government IT departments are consolidating and divesting infrastructure. Communication and collaboration across the entire value chain is required – from data centre operator and 3rd party providers through to infrastructure leaders and IT users…”
NEXTDC was involved in the event on many levels, including exhibiting to promote the value of our next-generation colocation and unique national network of independent data centres.
NEXTDC Chief Operating Officer Simon Cooper was one of four presenters on the popular panel session: Colo kings talk hybrid cloud, where his engineering insights and deep understanding of the global data centre industry kept everyone’s attention.
As reported on ITNews, Simon agreed that operators needed to stay focused on costs to win business from cloud providers. "What we have to do is continue to improve our cost structure so that those cloud providers and the small, medium and large enterprises that want to go into mixed mode [hybrid IT operations] can continue to do so," he said.
Simon also predicted that data centre operators would remain under further pressure to reduce costs to support the next wave of IT growth – what has become known as the Internet of Ihings (IoT). "With all these [IoT] endpoints coming we need to enable cost structures that make growth affordable."
You’ll see the NEXTDC team members are wearing their fab NEXTDC t-shirts: the ExpressRoute version represents the availability since February 24th of Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute connections from NEXTDC data centres; while the ONEDC version is about this week’s announcement of the ONEDC management portal becoming a DCIM SaaS platform.
Australia Post’s General Manager for Service Integration and Operations, Claire Bourke, had her own speaker session on streamlining digital delivery, where she outlined AusPost’s Building Future Ready IT project.
Part of this project involved Australia Post completing an extensive overhaul of their data centre service: opening two new facilities and decommissioning five, while NEXTDC’s $130 million flagship M1 Melbourne data centre has become Australia Post's primary production facility – driving financial and operational benefits for the organisation.
AusPost’s program of change involved three factors: data centre uplift and consolidation; Cloud capability; and enablers and accelerators, which together resulted in:
- Accelerated infrastructure delivery – 45% faster
- Carbon emission reduced by 1,530 tonnes p/a
- Higher availability and reduced facility costs resulting in 99.98% uptime.
Visit the ADCSS organiser’s website for more information on the event.
