Data Centre Issues Serves as Timely Wake-up Call

Data Centre Issues Serves as Timely Wake-up Call

Auckland, 21 October 2009 - Companies heavily reliant on online booking and ordering services need to scrutinise the quality of their data centres to avoid the sort of issues recently experienced by Air NZ.

A number of companies are potentially exposed and could easily suffer a similar fate, according to the CEO of an Auckland commercial data centre, Maxnet’s John Hanna.

“It should be a wake-up call for senior management.  While backup systems incur additional cost, they are absolutely necessary” he says.
 An outage can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue per hour.

“Unfortunately the data centres which support these systems have not necessarily kept up with the level of investment required to ensure availability is maintained.”
Maxnet Marketing Manager, Wayne Voss, says many of these private and commercial data centres were built in the 70’s and 80’s and only have a single power supply and backup generator.
“Today’s requirements were simply not in the contemplation of the people who designed them,” he says.

Upgrading a legacy data centre is not as easy as it may seem, particularly for the significant number of data centres situated in central business districts.

 “In some cases, the power utilities simply don’t have sufficient network capacity in the location of the data centre to facilitate a power upgrade”, says Voss.

“Inner city data centres also have space constraints which rule out installation of additional backup generators. Sometimes the only option is to start from scratch in a ‘greenfields’ site outside of the CBD. However the costs involved can be enormous - $30m or more. Many private and commercial data centre owners don’t have an appetite for that sort of capital expenditure.”

Five years ago Maxnet completely over-hauled its power and cooling infrastructure at its data centre, installing a secondary power supply and multiple chiller systems.

It now has state-of-the-art primary and secondary power supply systems, each with its own transformer, set of mains power supply boards, independent UPS systems, and three backup diesel generators.

“In an emergency situation we can generate the equivalent power to light up Te Anau township. More importantly we have multiple power back-up systems to ensure the power supply to our ‘mission critical’ customers does not go down. We haven’t had an interruption of power to our high availability customers for five years”, says Voss

Maxnet’s 200 rack data centre is situated in Albany, 20kms from Auckland’s CBD.

“We were very fortunate we made the decision to upgrade when we did in anticipation of today’s customer requirements. We’ve secured a significant amount of business on the back of the guaranteed 99.99% uptime we can now provide, and the density of equipment we’re capable of supporting – up to 30kW per rack.”

Most data centres are only capable of supporting 3-4kW of power draw per rack.

The devil is in the detail when it comes to providing maximum uptime, he says.

“You’ve got to be thoroughly checking primary and back-up systems on a regular scheduled basis. It’s imperative that data centre providers have external experts regularly checking these things so there are no nasty surprises when backup systems are brought online.

“It’s statistically impossible to guarantee 100% uptime indefinitely. We guarantee 99.99% uptime and are constantly investing in additional equipment and enhancing processes and systems with the goal of reducing the risk of an outage to an absolute minimum.”

In the last two years alone, Maxnet has invested $2m on additional infrastructure capacity and capability.

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