Headquartered in Brisbane, NEXTDC is an ASX200-listed data centre services provider. Australian owned and run, they design, build and operate a national footprint of critical infrastructure that fuels growth of the digital economy. Data centres house and connect the infrastructure powering the digital world we live in.

The IT industry’s critical role in economic growth has accelerated dramatically over the last 10 years. Today, every successful organisation must be technology led and data driven in order to thrive and differentiate. Data centres account for approximately 2% of the world’s power use today, however with the rate of growth of technology this is expected to climb to 8% by 2030. With that in mind, sustainable data centres are imperative to business and to the health of the planet.

Sustainability stewardship is critical in NEXTDCs business. Forming a core tenet of the value proposition that NEXTDC takes to market, it strives to play a leadership role in a circular economy aimed at eliminating waste, re-using and recycling resources, sourcing renewable energy where possible and where it cannot avoid the creation of carbon, offsetting it through purchasing carbon credits.

NEXTDC operates nine facilities across Australia’s five largest commercial hubs – Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth. Its products and services include selling floor space within its data centres which customers and the major cloud and ICT services companies in Australia use to house their critical IT infrastructure. It also provides a comprehensive array of connectivity solutions that interconnects residents inside each data centre to the wider ecosystem of customers, ICT partners, carriers and cloud platform providers within the same facility, in other NEXTDC data centre locations, or elsewhere in the world as required.

NEXTDC’s commitment to NABERS is consistent with its dedication to continuous improvement. With a heightened awareness of the industry’s impact on energy consumption, NEXTDC actively sought out an energy efficiency improvement project that would align with the company’s broader sustainability objectives. This included contributing to the circular economy by taking full responsibility for the impact that the business has on the environment.

The two main objectives of NEXTDC’s project was to gather more data about internal environments of its data centres, and the impact that tuning cooling equipment had on power efficiency. The ways in which they would recognise success was through their Power Utilisation Metric (PUE) ratings and reductions in overall power usage, and an independent assessor view when they are conducting an audit of building efficiency to arrive at a NABERS rating.

By both measures, NEXTDC’s efforts and changes at its M1 (Melbourne Data Centre) and S1 (Sydney Data Centre) facilities have delivered significant value to the full range of stakeholders including its customers, the business, operational staff and investors. Customers benefit through lower power bills as their digital infrastructure continues to grow and are directly assisted to achieve their own sustainability objectives by partnering with NEXTDC. They also have added confidence that NEXTDC data centres are setting new standards of performance under the management of an operations team that repeatedly demonstrates a culture of innovation.