First customer signed for new Datacom datacentre

Ballance Agri-Nutrients will run a hosted solution across Datacom's new datacentre near Hamilton and an existing facility in Auckland

Datacom has signed the first company for its new datacentre in Te Rapa near Hamilton, which is due to open in February 2013.

Ballance Agri-Nutrients, an farmer-owned fertiliser co-operative, will run a hosted solution across Datacom’s existing datacentre in Auckland named Orbit, and the new Hamilton datacentre named Kapua. Ballance employs more than 700 people across the county and sells more than a million tons of product annually.

The co-operative has been a Datacom customer for four years.

Ballance information systems manager Oliver Brinkmann says the dual datacentre solution provides a “strong sense of security.”

“We will have a ‘hot/hot’ datacentre solution. What that means is that our applications and data will run seamlessly across both Datacom’s Orbit and Hamilton datacentres. We can switch at any time between datacentres in the event of a problem, and can also balance the load across the two datacentres.”

“Both Orbit and the new Hamilton datacentre are in geologically stable areas. Both are constructed to the IL3 construction standard and both exceed the TIA-942 Tier 3 independent industry standard.

“We are confident that in terms of day-to-day operations and disaster recovery we have the best solution available.”

Datacom will be responsible for running the hardware and the network, while the Ballance in-house team will focus on applications and processes.

Datacom commercial director of IT management Scott Green says having Ballance as a customer at the new Kapua datacentre will showcase the company’s ability to “offer tight integration between two highly secure datacentres with locations carefully selected away from fault lines.”

Green says both datacentres have redundant fibre network connectivity to all major New Zealand telcos and ISPs along with services from international providers.

A Datacom spokesperson says that during this financial year $30 million was earmarked for capital expenditure across the Datacom Group, which included the land purchase and construction of Kapua.

Tomorrow Computerworld takes a look inside Datacom's Albany datacentre.