One of Australia's Big Four banks will be the anchor tenant for the A$200 million Polaris Data Centre in Melbourne.While either of the Melbourne-based NAB or ANZ banks could be a likely candidate for data centre, which is expected to be open by December 2012, management of Springfield Land Corporation, the centre's developers, would not be drawn on the identity of the tenant. However, an announcement is likely in the next four weeks.The Victorian data centre will be built in Derrimut, close to the new Western Freeway. It is the second data centre to be built by Springfield. Its first Polaris centre, in Brisbane, is a joint venture with Suncorp and has attracted a range of tenants including NBN Co and NEC.Springfield's managing director, Bob Sharpless, confirmed that the Derrimut facility will be very similar to the first Polaris centre and would also be a Tier 3+ rated data centre. The 14,000 square-metre high security building will feature biometric finger scanners, bullet-proof glass and man-traps in order to better protect the systems and data stored in the facility. The company also claims everything in the centre will be backed up threefold.The Melbourne centre is expected to offer a 7,000 square-metre raised floor technical area, and be able to accommodate IT loads of up to 10 megawatts.While the company has claimed it will also be the greenest data centre in Australia, it will not adopt co-generation. "I don't think that's viable at the moment," said Sharpless.A fresh wave of investment in data centres is underway in Australia, with recent projects announced by several companies, including Dell, HP, Fujitsu, Global Switch, Next DC and Macquarie Telecom. Demand for large external data centres is being driven by business and government interest in using premises and/or technology owned and operated by third parties. These independently owned specialist centres can often offer higher levels of security; the opportunity to consolidate a number of separate data centres into a single site; lower energy costs, and an improved environmental footprint.According to a report released last month by analyst firm Gartner, corporate data centre space requirements will be only 40 per cent of what they are today by 2018, a trend which is being driven in part by the continued interest in co-location of computers and storage in large independently operated and highly secure data centres.