by Divina Paredes

Datacom completes $52M expansion of NZ datacentres with relaunch of Christchurch facility

News
May 09, 2019
Business ContinuityCEO

Datacom has relaunched its Gloucester datacentre in Christchurch to mark the completion of a $52 million expansion and upgrade of its four New Zealand data centres.

The Gloucester expansion cost $9.7 million and has more than doubled the server rack space, as well as significantly upgrading infrastructure and resiliency.

“The expansion of Gloucester means that it operates on a level with our other world class datacentres in New Zealand (Orbit in Auckland, Kapua in Hamilton and Abel in Wellington),” says Tom Jacob, Datacom datacentres director.

Datacom was founded in Christchurch in 1965.

“It feels fitting to mark the completion of our New Zealand wide datacentre expansion in Christchurch as our Gloucester data centre opened a few weeks before the first Christchurch earthquake, and continued to run all the way through the Christchurch rebuild,” he says.

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“We are delivering a modern fit-for-purpose data centre, and our investment in Gloucester is an expression of our confidence in the South Island economy.”

He says Datacom is serving over 40 customers from the site, and they are a mix of corporates, local businesses, IT resellers, cloud providers and commercial customers.

He says Datacom sees significant business opportunity for Datacom in the South Island, and Gloucester is well positioned to support local businesses who want to expand around New Zealand.

The Gloucester data centre has been expanded from 52 server racks originally, adding 84 racks taking the total to 136 racks.

There is also capacity to add 60 more racks as needed, says Jacob.

The infrastructure has been upgraded, including new generators, new switchboards and a new UPS for uninterruptible power supply system.

“All of these aspects make sure that the datacentre can continue to operate if there are issues with the power supply ensuring data services even through natural disaster. The building has also had further earthquake strengthening,” says Jacob.

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