NEXTDC and Aurecon celebrate global award for innovative approach to data centre design

20 December 2018 – NEXTDC Engineering and partner Aurecon received the prestigious accolade of the Design Team of the Year at this year’s Data Center Dynamics (DCD) Global Awards.

The Award recognised the companies’ success in designing and building Australia’s first colocation data centres to receive Tier IV certification from Uptime Institute – a testament to their advanced reliability features, especially impressive under the hot Australian sun.

Since start-up in 2010, NEXTDC’s mission has been bold: to design and deliver the most reliable, energy efficient and innovative industry leading co-location data centres, firstly in the Asia Pacific and then globally. 

This ambitious outlook required a level of engineering and architectural teamwork never before seen in the industry. NEXTDC formed a design team led by Jeff Van Zetten, Head of Engineering and Design at NEXTDC, working in collaboration with Aurecon’s engineering team led by Matt Gurr, Technical Director, Built Environment, Les Thorpe, Technical Director, Built Environment and Sara Ferreira, Senior Mechanical Engineer, Built Environment, together with Gerard Page, Director, Architecture of Greenbox Architects. 

To date, Aurecon has delivered services in support of NEXTDC’s mission which included site acquisition, building and structural engineering design, environmental, surveying and acoustics to the NEXTDC B2 Brisbane Data Centre, and the NEXTDC M2 Melbourne Data Centre.

Aurecon has also provided optimisation and enhancement services for NEXTDC’s state-of-the-art S1 Sydney, P1 Perth and M1 Melbourne data centres (the first in Asia Pacific to employ power as a renewable energy source). 

"We set out from the start to build the best design team and the best data centres in the industry. The great result was only achieved due to the collaborative efforts from all the engineers and architects working together from NEXTDC Engineering, Aurecon and Greenbox," says Van Zetten.

Representing the next generation of data centre design in Australia, NEXTDC’s B2 and M2 Data Centres mark Australia’s first data centres with Uptime Institute Tier IV Certification for Constructed Facility. The independent auditors and inspectors of the globally respected Uptime Institute methodically scrutinised every aspect and component of each design, including the architectural compartmentalisation to ensure no single component failure can result in a mission critical system outage.

"The NEXTDC B2 and M2 data centres have a game-changing impact on the industry," Gurr said. "Data centre outages in the digital age can be catastrophic for businesses and lives with many critical services, such as hospitals and transport dependent on their reliable operation.

"Through the delivery of dependable and sustainable data centres, NEXTDC, in collaboration with Aurecon, is designing and building the critical infrastructure for posterity and setting an example for the rest of the industry to follow."

"When we think about the potentially devastating impact that a critical system outage can have on businesses and lives, we feel a sense of moral obligation to design and deliver the most reliable and sustainable data centres we possibly can, always having our children and future generations in mind," Van Zetten added.

Aurecon has built a strong global data centre team and a solid reputation for working with large data centre developers and operators to design, build and optimise their facilities, recently winning three new data centre projects in Asia.