Andrew Colley
From: The Australian
May 25, 2012 2:48PM

LEIGHTON’S subsidiary, Metronode will invest $183 million in datacentres facilities in NSW after bagging the state’s long-awaited datacentre consolidation and leasing tender.
Under the terms of the contract, NSW has committed to be anchor tenants in two new facilities for ten years.
The government went to tender for construction of the sites on the premise that they would replace the state’s current hodge-podge of 130 disparate datacentres facilities.
The two facilities are to be built in Sydney’s inner west industrial district of Silverwater and the second will be built in Unanderra south of Wollongong. The contract also included construction of fibre-optic links between the two facilities.
The projects will see 250 new jobs created at the peak of its construction.
NSW executive director of ICT strategy Pedro Harris said that the government expected to start moving into the facility within 12 months.
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“Over the construction phase we will be working with agencies on their migration plans. There’s a small group of agencies that have an acute need and they will be anchor tenants and they will start to move in as soon as the doors open,” Mr Harris.
The rest of the agencies would migrate into the facilities incrementally over four years after the construction was complete.
NSW Education and Health would be the first to go into the new facility as anchor tenants.
The contract commits the NSW government to take a third of capacity at the two sites. However, Mr Harris said the government had contractual built-in options to expand its requirements.