By Chris Thorpe, CEO and Founder, Leading Edge Data Centres

To date, one of the biggest technology challenges for regional Australian businesses is that ‘the edge’ has often stopped just outside a metropolitan city, making it expensive and inefficient for businesses located in rural or regional areas to stay connected. Historically, it has been too expensive and resource-intensive to design, build and deploy tiered data centres in regional communities.

This is why Uptime Institute introduced its TIER-Ready program, which enables specific designs of pre-built data centres to be validated and for those designs to then be used repeatedly to build modular tiered data centres for a consistent level of performance.

 Consequently, instead of needing to purposely design, certify, operationalize, and construct each data centre individually, a TIER-Ready approach means a single design is certified up-front and can be used multiple times in multiple locations. This approach will be particularly effective for servicing regional Australia, where low quality of connectivity and storage have been a long-standing issue.

Bringing Tier III-Ready data centres to regional Australia

We’ve spent the last two years meeting and speaking with regional Australian businesses to understand how they can best be connected to drive digital Australia forward. By collaborating with Uptime Institute, we are creating TIER-Ready data centres that can be deployed 50% faster and more cost-efficiently than any other data centre company in Australia.

With this modular approach to designing and deploying data centres, we’ll be rolling out data centres across Regional Australia – all in record time. For regional businesses, this means you can experience all the benefits of high-quality IT infrastructure that city-based businesses often enjoy, in your own backyard.

Ewan Smith from Uptime Institute commented, “Leading Edge Data Centres is taking an innovative and forward-thinking approach to designing, building and deploying modular data centres in regional Australia. They are delivering the first edge deployed, TIER-Ready data centres in Australia, providing network connectivity and storage capabilities that regional Australian businesses have not experienced before.

“Leading Edge Data Centres has the ability to roll out a Tier III Certified data centre every month. Ordinarily, this would be incredibly challenging to do while maintaining consistent quality and performance. However, by taking a TIER-Ready and modular approach, they are circumventing the time-consuming and costly design and certification processes for each individual module. As Australian businesses and technology companies prepare for a digital future, amid the rollout of 5G nationwide, the rise of artificial intelligence technologies, and the continuously growing consumption of data, this is an ideal time for a market challenger like Leading Edge Data Centres to bring multiple TIER-Ready data centres to the edge at speed.”

Priming Regional Australia for a digital future

With high-quality networking connectivity, storage, cloud and data management capabilities based on local infrastructure, businesses in towns like Tamworth, Dubbo, Wagga Wagga and Coffs Harbor will be able to grow faster and stay better connected than ever before. This fabric of infrastructure and connectivity will also position regional towns and communities well for metro-based and international businesses wanting to optimize their data and connectivity costs.

For example, autonomous tractors and robotic machinery can run on autopilot, communicating with nearby sensors to obtain the necessary data about the surrounding environment. Using computer vision and pre-loaded field data, “agribots” can calculate the most efficient paths to cover the required area, taking into account the type of performed task, number of vehicles currently in the field, size of implements, and more. Plus, they can reroute automatically in case of an unexpected obstacle or stop completely if there is a human or animal in the way.

With our edge ecosystem, businesses can take control of how this data is managed locally, versus how the data has to travel for processing in costly metro-based data centres. Coupled with our TIER-Ready approach to quickly deploying data centres at the edge, this capability not only reduces costs and optimises resources, but also frees up both of these things for further research and development.

As the opportunities to grow businesses in regional Australia continue to increase, particularly as more businesses start to consider moving away from CBD locations, we are excited to be rolling out our Tier III-Ready data centres at scale and speed.

Read more about our Newcastle data centre due to open later this year, or get in touch for further information about our approach to TIER-Ready edge data centres.