CLOUD COMPUTING
Beautiful but harsh : a dry riverbed in New South Wales connected with us , they ’ re reducing their cost and increasing their speed and resilience . They ’ re now actually recruiting people and their business is back into growth mode .”
Harnessing the natural landscape Rural Australia ’ s harsh landscape adds an extra challenge to levelling out digital equity , but Thorpe and Leading Edge , from the offset , have chosen to leverage this to their advantage rather than see it as an obstacle .
“ Regional Australia is really harsh ,” Thorpe demonstrates . “ You can have extremely hot and extremely cold environments as well as drought and floods . So we needed to design an infrastructure that was going to be able to cope with all of those environments , plus be sustainable .”
With this in mind , Leading Edge , in collaboration with Schneider Electric , constructed a modular-style data centre in New South Wales armed with a solar shield over the top to protect the facility from the arid landscape and harness the sun ’ s rays .
“ The building below is completely protected from the elements ,” Thorpe shares . “ As well as covering the roof in solar , we ’ ve got lightning conductors on the roof and a two end environment , so we have multiple layers of redundancy for power and cooling .”
The facility can also run off-grid in the case of loss of power : a common occurrence in rural Australia thanks to frequent storms and a contributor to the ongoing digital inequality .
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