Speaking following the opening of its new $60 million Takanini Data Centre in Auckland, Spark Digital CEO Tim Miles believes the future for New Zealand business is digital.
Located on Popes Road Takanini, Auckland, the new facility expands the company's investment programme in cloud services, opened by Prime Minister John Key on Thursday.
Check out the full run down of the data centre's capabilities and features below:
Resiliency:
The facility is located on a Tier 3 site and built to TIA 942-A (2012) standard.
All aspects of the facility meet and in many cases exceed TIA942-A levels of redundancy and resilience. A minimum of N+1 for all critical systems is required to meet TIA942-A requirements.
Tier 3 requires independent certification and provides a very high level of resiliency, which is important for enterprise and Government clients. TIA standards are a global benchmark.
The site:
Located upstream from the Otahuhu substation pinch point, the site is zoned industrial with no immediate neighbours, has multiple road accesses and is in a low tsunami risk location.
It’s well located for power, is very close to Telecom’s backbone network and other telecommunication providers (the data centre will be carrier agnostic) and provides sufficient geographical separation from the existing Telecom site and other service providers. It meets high levels of security design.
Design:
The Takanini data centre design is modular, which speeds up deployment time, saves energy, and allows for ongoing deployment of new technology.
This modular construction approach means smaller sized ‘PODs’ of capacity are fitted out and activated within the larger facility.
Each POD contains four 100-rack data halls and Takanini has room for three PODs (1200 racks).
Energy is expended only for space in active use, and design can be reviewed as PODs are developed, keeping clients connected to advances in technology.
The design also has a strong focus on sustainability, PUE and future flexibility.
A modular cooling design will be employed to match the highly modular electrical systems, and free cooling technology will be utilised to improve efficiency as well as aisle containment.
This modularity also provides higher levels of resilience to the entire system.
The cooling system is closely coupled to the IT load to increase efficiency of cooling delivery. Each data hall has its own independent mechanical and electrical infrastructure, allowing halls to be configured to suit different environments and densities.
This simplifies operational management and reduces risk. The electrical solution is also highly modular and does not employ big heavy-duty electrical distribution, which can create points of failure.
This modular approach eliminates the need for static transfer switching, which substantially improves availability while significantly reducing the cost of electrical distribution systems.
The Takanini data centre also utilises the latest fibre cabling standards and will be a part of Telecom’s new Optical Transport Network (OTN), delivering the fastest, lowest latency, high capacity fibre backbone. Copper services will also be provided for backward compatibility.
Future flexibility was a key design requirement. A scalable design allows for the exact capacity of the data centre to be implemented down to an individual rack level, virtually eliminating stranded capacity issues.
Takanini utilises high density contained aisle design which starts out at today’s average (~5kW) and can then scale up to meet future IT needs - up to and beyond 10kW per rack. Maximum rack loads of up to 28kW can be provided.