The Optus Stadium, also known as the Perth Stadium, stands as a cutting-edge, versatile venue situated in Perth, Western Australia. Officially unveiled in January 2018, this marvel was completed at the close of 2017, boasting a seating capacity exceeding 60,000 individuals. Ranking as the third-largest stadium in Australia, following the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Stadium Australia, it has earned the distinction of being Australia’s most intelligent and technologically advanced stadium.
Siemens’ Commercial Project Manager, Sascha Rhalf, deems the stadium a landmark project, shaping Perth’s skyline and capturing public attention from its inception due to substantial government funding. A collaborative effort involving Providence Solutions Australia, Siemens, and BGIS has paved the way for the creation of one of Australia’s premier stadiums, now approaching its first year of operational success.
Navigating the complexities of the project proved challenging, given the stadium’s bespoke design and its status as a greenfield project, which lacked established blueprints. The need for a customized IT management solution was paramount, addressing intricate requirements such as high-megapixel cameras, mission-critical servers, multi-vendor integrations, event-day service delivery, and diverse ICT needs—all while adhering to budget constraints and strict timelines.
The project’s intricacies extended to the incorporation of cutting-edge technologies for future-proofing, encompassing face recognition, advanced access systems, and thousands of sensors. Despite the forward-looking approach, the challenge lay in managing and securely storing the substantial amount of on-site data generated.
Performance requirements added further complexity, particularly in managing around 700 security cameras, including a significant number of ultra-high-definition cameras. The CCTV management solution, equipped with 1Pb of scalable tiered storage, was designed for review, analytics, facial recognition, and database matching.
With varied availability requirements ranging from 99.999% to 99.9%, ensuring uninterrupted data processing and application availability was critical. This drove the need for a solution providing continuous computing during repairs, eliminating data loss, and maintaining transaction integrity.
Providence Solutions Australia emerged as a key technology partner, contributing to the end-to-end design and construction of the unified compute IT platform for Optus Stadium. As the first stadium in Australia to embrace a unified, continuous computing infrastructure platform, the venue relies on a hyper-converged unified computing platform for managing diverse systems and applications.
The implementation of SIOS DataKeeper with Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering was pivotal in providing high availability for Hyper-V virtual machines. This decision ensured a simple, manageable, cost-effective, and robust solution capable of supporting multiple device integrations securely while guaranteeing high availability.
The unified continuous computing infrastructure platform serves as a comprehensive solution for stadium operations, consolidating various systems under one umbrella. From video surveillance and industrial monitoring to HVAC, security, and lighting control, the super-platform seamlessly integrates third-party vendor applications, exemplifying a technological triumph in stadium architecture.
