IBM to help Geraldton become smarter

IBM and Market Creations, a business solutions provider based in the City of Greater Geraldton, have announced the signing of a multi-million dollar deal, which enables the city to become a completely carbon-neutral region and emerge as a hub for sustainable and renewable energy.

Geraldton is the administrative center of the Australian Midwest’s diverse industry base, which includes mining, fishing, manufacturing, construction, agriculture and tourism. The city is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade, with more than AUD$27 billion of planned investments for the region.

IBM and Market Creations will design and construct the first cloud-enabled data center in Geraldton to help the city realize its goals of energy efficiency and economic competitiveness.

“With Geraldton fast becoming a strategic service for industries across Western Australia, we have a responsibility to ensure that our city develops and expands in a sustainable way – and without compromising the quality-of-life for our citizens as the economic growth of the city continues to accelerate,” said Ian Carpenter, Mayor, City of Greater Geraldton.

“Geraldton needs to be able to best leverage scalable and resilient technology to support our vision of becoming a technologically advanced and carbon-neutral hub. The new data center will help provide that platform as the first stage of this exciting digital evolution for our city and citizens.”
Under the contract, IBM will design and construct a scalable modular data center with the uptime, security and resiliency features needed to sustain growth. The data center will be designed for a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.3 or less, making it one of the most energy-efficient data centers in Australia.

The data center will have the ability to scale up to four times its current capacity, a key requirement that aligns with the City of Greater Geraldton’s projected growth as a hub for the region’s surrounding industries. The cloud capabilities will enable the facility to operate as a multi-tenanted data center, providing organisations with the computing power, flexibility, and cost-efficiency that IBM’s cloud infrastructure offers.

“We’re pleased to be supporting Geraldton’s forward-thinking initiatives to become a more efficient and competitive city,” said Darren Lee, Managing Director, Market Creations. “As a sustainable, highly robust and cloud-enabled data center, the facility is expressly designed to meet the future demand of not just Geraldton, but the greater region and industries which it continues to service and lead.”

The investment is consistent with one of many recommendations made by IBM to the City of Greater Geraldton in 2012, when IBM performed pro bono consulting here. The engagement was funded by the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge, a competitive grants program that has provided US$50 million worth of consulting for 100 cities worldwide over the last three years. Geraldton had asked IBM to evaluate its vision to become a digital and carbon-neutral regional hub.

“We are excited by the opportunity to realize our initial recommendations in a practical way for Geraldton,” said David Yip, Technical Leader IBM Smarter Planet and Cities Solutions. “The state-of-the-art data center serves as an example of how cities with bold leadership can become ‘smarter’ in realizing future economic opportunities while advancing outcomes for both citizens and the environment.”