Canberra's Datapod targets $150m global market

James Riley
Monday, 17 August 2009 13:30

IT Industry - Market

Tiny Canberra engineering outfit Datapod has unveiled a next-generation, modular data centre system that it expects to generate as much as $150 million in export revenue over the next five years.

The Datapod systems, which are designed for ultra-fast, low-cost deployment of a low power consumption data centre, have been designed from the ground up with global markets in mind.

The company has signed a top-tier strategic relationship with data centre infrastructure specialist APC by Scheidner Electric as its worldwide roll-out partner. The units will be manufactured locally in conjunction with APC and is expected to create 30 new jobs in the local market.

Datapod’s system modules are the same size and 20-foot container equivalents. But unlike first-generation containerised data centres have been engineered entirely for data centre purposes. They are self contained, heavily insulated units that can be quickly joined together to create high-tech, green environment for data centres of five to 50 racks in size.

While the units can be dropped into remote and hostile environments and function normally as long as the site has adequate electric, water and connectivity – making their immediate application in disaster zones, or remote areas attractive (even for defence-related purposes) – by far the bigger market is as a replacement for bricks and mortar data centres.

Datapod managing director Scott Carr said the difficulty with data centre deployment were usually infrastructure-related challenges – the difficulty in optimising the brick and mortar environment that was never intended to host large ICT systems.

Datacentre also tended to be housed on-premises in expensive CBD real estate. The modular system enabled Datapod units to be very rapidly deployed in industrial estates, or even off car parks to reduce rental costs.

“Whether you need to expand, retract, or relocate your server room or data centre, you need to be able to do so quickly and ensure it is right-sized to meet your current capacity requirements,” Carr said.

“Bricks and mortar data centre projects are slow to evolve and costly to install and expand.

The Rudd Government’s freshly minted Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation and Industry Richard Marles said the Datapod initiative was a good model for Australian companies looking at overseas markets to follow.

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