CDC Data Centres’ Silverdale facility.
Credit: Supplied
Auckland-based private cloud pioneer OneNet is exiting Datacom’s Orbit data centre in favour of CDC Data Centres’ newly-launched facilities.
Co-founder Dr Michael Snowden said having invested substantially in low-energy server hardware and migrating the company’s customer base to CDC’s Silverdale data centre, OneNet would now provide its private cloud computing management services under a co-location model.
The migration process began when Datacom notified OneNet in late 2021 that it would need to have it vacate the data floor that it was currently using, Snowden told Reseller News.
“Datacom wanted to upgrade this particular floor,” he said. “While assistance was offered by Datacom, the complex inter-rack cabling effectively meant that a complete rebuild would be almost as costly. Hence, OneNet was able to consider a complete move for a similar cost.”
The migration of servers began in mid-August, around the same time the data centre was opened for business, and would run through to the end of November.
While OneNet was a customer of CDC, Snowden said, the companies had a close working relationship and it effectively resold CDC’s services through OneNet’s client base.
“The current market understanding of ‘private cloud’ is that an organisation, such as OneNet, offers its cloud services to selected clients,” Snowden explained.
“The scale is obviously much smaller than a hyperscale cloud, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon (AWS). Another key difference is that, with public clouds such as Azure and AWS, anyone with a credit card can use their services.
“In contrast, OneNet selects its clients based on careful market segmentation criteria and builds close and enduring business relationships with its clients.”
OneNet had co-located its private computing cloud in Datacom’s Orbit data centre for around 15 years.
As the first organisation to operate from one of the country’s new hyperscale facilities, Snowden warned that New Zealand’s tech worker capacity was set to come under even more pressure as the number of such data centres grew.
Pandemic-led demand had put the cloud computing market on a rapid, upward trajectory – with a corresponding increase in the need for skilled IT staff.
At the same time, it would accelerate a move to the cloud among many large corporates and government agencies, placing further pressure on a constrained labour pool.
“New Zealand’s uptake of cloud computing has been lagging behind many other countries for some time. However, industry data shows a significant increase this year, with local spending on public cloud services set to grow by 26 per cent to $2.5 billion,” he said.
The lag in adoption could be partially attributed to a reticence amongst organisations about having their data in the hands of a third party, particularly if governed under a foreign country’s legislation. However, another barrier was the significant investment in customised legacy applications made by Kiwi companies – systems that could not easily be hosted in a cloud environment.
“The arrival of hyperscale data centres is set to change that, helping to send a ‘reassurance’ message to the market and addressing many of the security and customisation concerns that have previously held back this migration,” Snowden said
New Zealand businesses were also adapting to the shortage of IT staff by moving to an infrastructure as a service model.
“What we know about the retention of skilled IT workers is that they need to be continually challenged on a professional level,” he said.
“Often working in-house on a single system does not provide exposure to the latest technologies or a variety of organisations at different stages in their development.”
When businesses struggled to compete for high-quality staff they often looked to outsource their infrastructure to providers that could attract and retain this resource by offering a more diverse work environment.
“This marks a fundamental shift in a traditional business model where organisations are moving from hosting their own on-premises hardware to providers which can run it in the cloud on their behalf,” he said.
Snowden said his cloud computing firm managed the technology needs of some of the country’s largest industrial manufacturers and service providers and had seen strong growth across its Australasian customer base since the start of the pandemic.
According to Immigration New Zealand, ICT roles make up 35 per cent of all professions on the government’s long-term skills shortage list. Data from technology industry bodies suggested over 10,000 positions were unfilled in the sector.
CDC Data Centres has established the country’s first two hyperscale data centres, each a 14MW, Tier 3 facility and several times larger than existing local data centres, Snowden said. It also used one hundred per cent renewable and carboNZero Certified electricity and an innovative closed-loop cooling system which requires almost no water to operate.
