NEXTDC announced that its B2 Brisbane data centre is the first Australian data centre – and the first Asia Pacific colocation data centre – to receive Tier IV Certification of Constructed Facility (TCCF) from Uptime Institute, the world’s leading independent data centre advisory and certification organisation.

B2 was awarded Uptime Institute Tier IV Certification for Design Documents (TCDD) earlier this year and has undergone rigorous on-site audit and testing by Uptime Institute to confirm its fault tolerance, a key feature of Tier IV facilities. This addresses the data centre’s ability to withstand individual equipment failures or distribution path interruptions from an unexpected event or planned work activity and maintain IT operations, and confirms the exceptional resilience of the facility’s critical infrastructure for NEXTDC customers.

NEXTDC CEO Craig Scroggie commented, “Our new Uptime Institute Tier IV Certification for Fault Tolerance and Tier III Gold Certification in Operational Sustainability represents the highest level of operational excellence and assurance for our customers, and reflects the continued thought leadership and technical innovation that is driving NEXTDC’s success.”

Now welcoming its first customers, last night NEXTDC celebrated the opening last month of the B2 data centre with an event for local partners and the facility’s customers, which include enterprises and government agencies, major telcos and network providers, national NEXTDC partners, as well as a host of local and international cloud providers.

B2 is specifically designed to fulfil organisations’ current and future IT needs, giving customers the ability to scale quickly to accommodate the rapid growth and power-hungry IT infrastructure that is a feature of modern, cloud-based IT services.

CT4 is recognised as a leading international cloud services provider and an existing customer at NEXTDC’s B1 data centre. CT4 were one of the first early-access customers through the doors at B2, a move overseen by CT4 Technology Manager, Wayne Moore. “The initial services CT4 will be offering from B2 will be VDI for a building franchise, “branch office” IaaS for a major resources company and active DR for our other sites. For customers using Office365 and workloads in Azure, we will be adding ExpressRoute connectivity at B2.

NEXTDC’s new data centres in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney will offer direct connectivity to existing NEXTDC facilities in those cities, and CT4 used that service to seamlessly link B2 with their infrastructure at B1.

NEXTDC’s Head of Engineering and Design, Jeff Van Zetten, said “Achieving Uptime Institute’s Tier IV Certification is partly about keeping the design elegantly simple, and keeping the paths separated to make it fault tolerant. The data centres that we build and operate are infrastructure for the future, and they have to meet the highest reliability standards.

“Although some data centre companies try to achieve a Tier IV facility and gain preliminary design documents certification, they often don’t build it according to the Tier IV-certified design or have the facility tested and certified by Uptime Institute. Our team put in an exceptional effort to have B2 ready for Uptime Institute to perform the most rigorous site inspections and fault tolerance testing to prove that NEXTDC is the first data centre operator in Australia to actually deliver on the promise of Tier IV reliability.”

NEXTDC has previously announced it also intends to achieve Uptime Institute Tier IV Constructed Facility certification for its new M2 Melbourne and S2 Sydney data centres.

For more information on Uptime Institute Tier IV and NEXTDC’s second-generation data centre design, see the blog New generation of data centre resilience, which includes further quotes from NEXTDC Chief Operating Officer Simon Cooper and Head of Engineering and Design Jeff Van Zetten.

Cloud Plus CEO, Jules Rumsey: “NEXTDC continues to facilitate our rapid growth by providing Cloud Plus with world-class facilities, such as the new Tier IV-certified B2 Brisbane data centre, which are ideal for hosting our network, security and hosting infrastructure in the major capital cities around Australia.”

Oper8 Sales Director, Nick Lovell: “What B2 offers Oper8 is access to space and a highly accredited facility that we can easily sell. Accreditations are critical, and having a Tier IV facility locally, in Brisbane, and outside of the major capital cities, I think is fantastic.”

VMvault Senior Systems Consultant, Radek Tkaczyk: “With NEXTDC B2 being a Tier IV data centre, it gives us and NEXTDC the recognition and industry power to really showcase what can be done with highly redundant, highly reliable cloud communications.”