Datacom pumps $52 million into upgrading and extending its data centres in New Zealand

Thursday, 9 May 2019

Datacom has extended server racks at its Gloucester Street, Christchurch, data centre to 136 to enable it to store more customer information and applications.

Homegrown billion-dollar IT company Datacom has completed a $52 million expansion and upgrade of its four data centres in New Zealand.

The completion of the 16-month $9.7m upgrade of its Christchurch data centre in Gloucester Street in the central city marked the completion of the huge expansion, Tom Jacobs, Datacom's data centre director said.

The company believed it had been been the largest data centre organisation in New Zealand before the expansion and remained so.

Jacobs said the $52m programme had expanded the company's capacity by 40 per cent. Its four centres are in Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton and Christchurch.

Datacom has spent $9.7m upgrading its Gloucester Street data centre in Christchurch.

* Datacom becomes first Kiwi IT firm to hit $1 billion in sales

* Datacom takes top sport from Spark in IT services market**

'As far as I know we are the only organisation undertaking significant investment in data centres as well so we are fully committed to that business.'

Several screens in the data centre show all aspects of the operation.

From small beginnings in 1965 in Christchurch Datacom has grown to have more than 6500 employees in New Zealand, Australia and Asia, Europe and the Americas. It remains New Zealand-owned with the Super Fund owning 39 per cent.

'The data centre business at this time, when people talk about taking stuff off to cloud, has never been more active in terms of our prospects and our sales.'

Datacom had been focusing on this for the past four years. Its target customers were telcos, IT resellers and software-as-a-service providers because they were the customers of the future in the long term.

The quality of a data centre was critical to maintaining business in the future.

'I think the changing nature of how much data is being derived by organisations means that data centre demand is going to continue to grow wherever it is located,' Jacobs said.

At its new data centre in Hamilton, Kapua (Maori for cloud), built about seven years ago, it had opened and fitted out more space for new customers. It would eventually be the largest of its New Zealand data centres.

Server racks store servers which host customers' data.

That data centre was designed to support 'public cloud' organisations - such as Microsoft, Azure, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google - coming to New Zealand and that centre could be extended many times over. It had a capacity for 900 racks and expected to double that over time.

At the moment its biggest data centre was Orbit in Auckland where it had just completed a well over $20m project to added 300 racks to take it to 1100.

Jacobs said organisations going to lower quality data centres would tend to move to high quality ones in the future where data and applications were available to customers all the time because they were only saving a few hundred dollars with the lower quality data centres.

The expansion and upgrade of the Gloucester Street centre mean that it was world-class like its other data centres in New Zealand.

It had been expanded from 52 server racks to 136 racks where servers which host customers' data are stored, with capacity to add 60 more racks.

Datacom served over 40 customers from the site, a mix of corporates, local businesses, IT resellers, cloud providers and commercial customers.

'We see a significant business opportunity in the South Island, particularly in supporting the growing export sector.'

Importantly the infrastructure had been upgraded, including new generators, new switchboards and a new UPS (uninterruptable power supply system), new security systems and new airconditioning systems.

'All of these aspects make sure that the data centre can continue to operate if there are issues with the power supply ensuring data services even through natural disaster.'

The building had also had further earthquake strengthening.

Datacom had completed a similar project in Wellington with a building strengthening and replacement of all the infrastructure in the centre while keeping it up and running.

'That's been the most technically challenging project that we've undertaken.'

The $52m expenditure was not the end of Datacom's expansion and upgrades.

'There will be a lull for a year or two but I'm going to be going back to the board asking for more money inevitably I think.'