Following its successful bid to be a preferred supplier of cloud and datacentre services to the government, Datacom has announced plans to build a tier 3 data centre in Hamilton.
The infrastructure as a service contract, signed yesterday, is for a period of 10 years with an optional five- year extension. Revera was also named as a successful bidder, and is has begun construction work on a new $40 million datacentre at Upper Hutt, near Wellington.
Datacom New Zealand CEO Greg Davidson says a standalone cloud computing platform, Datacom Cloud Services for Government, will be available within 90 days.
Storage and computer services will be provided in a range of price, performance and availability tiers to meet varying agency requirements. An online portal will provide agencies with “a single pane of glass” to view, provision and manage the services provided. The portal will be secured using the government’s igovt identity verification service.
Datacom says in a statement that its Cloud Services for Government computing platform is based on the expertise gained by its operation of its established commercial cloud platform, running across three of datacentres in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
This commercial platform now provides cloud services to more than 100 clients via 1,500 machines, with more than one petabyte of storage under management. These numbers are growing at 15 percent per month., Datacom says.
As well as the new datacentre in Hamilton, existing cloud and datacentre infrastructure in Auckland and Wellington will be extended. Work on the new datacentre has begun and it will open early in 2013.
Datacom says it expects the very low earthquake risk profile of Hamilton will make that location an attractive site for both government and commercial organisations to house IT systems.
The design consultants for the new data centre in Hamilton are Beca Carter with construction services being provided by Fletcher Building – the same team that delivered Datacom’s Auckland tier-3 facility, commissioned 2 years ago.
Datacom Group CEO Jonathan Ladd says Datacom wwill continue to invest in new cloud infrastructure right across the region.
“With Australia and particularly New Zealand recognised as high growth markets for cloud services, Datacom is continuing to invest significantly in infrastructure across the region, including expanding its Sydney cloud platform and establishing nodes in Melbourne and Brisbane to meet demand,” he says. “Datacom applauds the NZ Government’s progressive initiative in establishing the provision of infrastructure as a service to its agencies, which we believe is a world-first on this all-of-government scale for a national administration.” Technology to operate Datacom’s cloud services is sourced from Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware.
Datacom employs more than 3500 staff across New Zealand, Australia and Asia. Revenues in the last financial year ended March 31 exceeded NZ$725m.