Businesses are generating huge amounts of data causing a considerable reliance on off-site storage facilities. These warehouse-sized buildings are called ‘data centres’, and are beginning to emerge across urbanised areas.
A growing population and the demand for larger homes are not the only pressures on existing Australian cities. Data centres will be the next planning challenge for local councils and communities. The Planning Boardroom spoke with an experienced architect to understand the challenges involved with designing data centres. The above image shows the Interactive Port Park data centre in Melbourne.
What are data centres?
The information stored in data centres is primarily used for the daily operations of businesses and these centres are strategically located. Just like a self-storage facility (i.e. Storage King and Kennards), you will never find a data centre situated in bushfire or flood prone areas. In addition to providing enormous amounts of space for data storage, they can also accommodate staff offices.
Not only is the exterior architecture essential, the necessary technology is crucial for a smooth operating centre. Data centres, just like homes are not immune to power failures. A Sydney data centre experienced a power outage on 20th February 2011 which shut down Virgin Blue’s check-in system for two hours.
Examples of centres around the world
Anyone who has followed the allegations against WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, would have seen recent images of his James Bond inspired high-tech secure facility in Stockholm. WikiLeaks releases political, ethical and historic significant information to the public and their data centre is located 100 feet below ground in a former Cold War nuclear bunker. Below are exclusive images taken from the underground data centre.
Images Source: Daily Mail
Amazon is not only well-known for being perhaps the world’s largest online bookstore, it also operates out of a 10,800m2 data centre in Oregon which cost at least $100m back in 2008. Software giant Microsoft has its own data centre pictured below.
Image Source: Seattle Times
The US spy agency NSA also owns a state of the art data centre.
Image Source: Techworld
During the preparation of this article I was actually informed by my website host that they will be transferring all my data to a new data centre. They anticipate the website to be unavailable for around 2-3 hours during the transfer. So data centres are not just relevant for large businesses, they are also essential for websites like The Planning Boardroom.
An urban challenge
The challenge of data centres is offering an architectural appealing building, while also providing an essential service for business. Do they offer connectivity to their surroundings and enhance the streetscape?
Andrew Owens, architect at Greenbox Architecture, a firm with extensive experience in designing data centres, provided his professional insights with The Planning Boardroom. He suggested that the complex service requirements of data centres need architectural direction to successfully integrate the facility within an urban environment.
In Michael Lemm’s article ‘Data Centers and the Environment’, he outlined 12 factors to consider when developing a data centre including; the roof design, emergency power and height limit. No doubt architects like Owens are also incorporating similar design principles when proposing new facilities.
Another challenge identified by Owens lies with the high density locations often selected to build data centres. Land size constraints create issues for providing suitable power generation for the site and it can be “problematic when it comes to installing, replacing and maintaining the large pieces of electrical and mechanical plant associated with the facility.”
Owens also suggested that there is no clear definition for data centres as the Building Code of Australia and Local Environmental Plans fall silent for this type of land use.
Provision of appropriate security measures are also of concern for these sensitive facilities. Considering data centres are not properly defined in planning controls, there are non-compliances with carparking requirements. Owens believed data centres can be perceived as an ‘overdevelopment’ of the site, even though the majority of floor space is utilised by plant space, than usable space.
The future of data centres
I believe that as urban sprawl continues to occur in major cities across the world, data centres will be pushed into urbanised areas. Owens predicts data centres will become more energy efficient and could even provide excess energy back into the electricity grid to supply other land uses. Typically these centres will continue to be built in urbanised areas to take advantage of existing energy systems and be accessible for staff.
The rundown
Not knowing too much about data centres before I commenced research for this article, I can now appreciate the complexities involved with the design and planning stages. Data centres are not ‘white elephant’ developments that are simply dropped into urban environments wherever land is available. Careful consideration is given to both the exterior and interior of these essential facilities to make them function properly.
As more centres are built, nationally recognised design guidelines could be devised in the future and the planning system could be tweaked to create proper definitions and controls for data centres. Furthermore, with the advent of an oil-depleted society, renewable energy systems will be common practice for all new data centres.
Featured Image Source: Interactive, Melbourne Data Centre
Acknowledgement
Thank you to Andrew Owens from Greenbox Architecture for his assistance with preparing this article.
