Datacom puts on a roof shout for ‘Kapua’ Data Centre

Later today Datacom staff and the onsite construction teams will get together for a ‘roof shout’ to celebrate the completion of structural works on ‘Kapua’, Datacom’s under construction NZ$30 million data centre.

Located in Hamilton Kapua is Datacom’s newest tier 3+ data centre and is on track to open for business in early February 2013.

Named Kapua, which means ‘cloud’ in Maori language, this data centre will be the sister facility to Datacom’s Orbit data centre located in Albany.

Steve Matheson Datacom COO says. “Our significant investment here in Kapua supports rising customer demand for failsafe uptime teamed with the knowledge that their data is securely hosted domestically.”

Built to meet the exacting government security requirements the new centre will have the capacity to house 920 racks with room for expansion.

Datacom is building two data floors in the first stage of development with plans to expand to five data floors plus further hardened tier 4 rooms as required. 

The Hamilton location was selected for its geographic suitability, high network connectivity and as an emerging hub of high tech business activity. Second only to Auckland, Hamilton is the most geologically stable area in New Zealand and from a network perspective Hamilton is ideal with all the major network providers running fibre rings through that city.

A further strength in the Hamilton location of Kapua is the relative closeness to Auckland which brings with it the ability to run synchronous SAN to SAN replication to Datacom’s sister Orbit data centre in Auckland.

The pairing of two tier 3+ data centres provides the ideal hosting environment for any mission critical application and is an unmatched capability in New Zealand.

Matheson says, “With the right optical equipment on the end of the fibre we can provide effectively any speed of network required between the centres at minimal latency.”

The capability will be a boon for those customers seeking to implement highly resilient and available distributed computing environments.

“Customer network connections are getting faster on the back of the government sponsored fibre initiatives and there is an increased expectation that applications will be responsive and media rich.  Delivering this experience requires local servers.” says Matheson.

Customers will be able to install their own IT equipment in the centre, make use of the Datacom Cloud Service (DCS), or in the case of Government Agencies the Datacom Cloud Service for Government (DCSG).

Kapua uses the same innovative and sustainable free air cooling system that is deployed at the Orbit centre in Auckland.  Power and cooling design is for 5.8MW of power capability to the IT equipment.

Kapua will be staffed 24x7 by specialist local Hamilton people recruited specifically into these new roles.  The Kapua data centre team are currently being trained in Datacom’s processes and procedures in Auckland.