Demand for Cloud services and more data centre space across the Tasman has proved profitable for IBM with an $NZ80 million ($AU63.5 million) data centre opened at Highbrook Business Park in Auckland, New Zealand.
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The data centre was designed to provide both mid-sized and large organisations with a range of services, from outsourcing and managed hosted services through to virtual server services.
According to the vendor, the 5,200 metre facility is a modular level three data centre and includes 1500 metres of raised floor to accommodate 720 server racks. There are plans to double plans by building another data centre so that IBM can meet customer demand for the next 15 years.
The centre features a number of Green IT technologies including a centralised energy consumption analysis system which measures power, water and diesel usage to conserve energy when demand is lower. Consumption is also reduced by taking advantage of free cooling, this involves using the outside air to cool the data centre while rain water stored in over-sized underground pipes helps to cool the IT systems.
"By extracting heat through plate exchangers connected to each cooling tower, this free cooling is made possible for longer periods, even in Auckland’s sub-tropical climate," said an IBM spokesperson in a statement.
Support for Cloud computing workloads means the data centre was enabled for virtualization, auto provisioning, metering and billing, as well as integrated service management.
IBM Australia has been touting its green data centres to enterprise customers as well. Last year it showed off the portable modular data centre which it was targeting at banks and central business district customers who did not have enough room for a data centre.
“Ready access to renewable energy from a variety of natural resources presents significant opportunities to New Zealand data centre and data storage market,” said New Zealand ICT chief executive,Brett O’Riley, in a statement.
“The IBM data centre reinforces the importance of green ICT for New Zealand in seeking to host data nationally, and for major international players," he said. Coupled with planned new international connectivity, New Zealand will now have an extremely compelling proposition.”
IBM general manager for global services, Greg Farmer, told Computerworld New Zealand that it had signed up 13 clients for the centre so far. He would only name two - First Mortgage Services and Localist, a subsidiary of New Zealand Post.
The vendor is one of four suppliers, including Datacom, Gen-i and Revera, shortlisted by the New Zealand government to provide data centre housing under the Infrastructure-as-a-service contract.
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