No hard feelings as Air NZ chooses $80m IBM data centre

Air New Zealand has renewed its data centre services contract with IBM for ten years, despite a 2009 hiccup which affected 10,000 Air New Zealand passengers.

The airline announced today that it had chosen IBM from a number of data centre providers to store and manage key IT systems for 10 years and would be moving from the Tier 1 Newton centre where its services had previously been handled by IBM, to Big Blue's new $80 million, Tier 3 centre in Highbrook Business Park, East Tamaki. 

The tier classifications measure data accessibilty, thus requiring robust redundancy measures among other specifications.  The East Tamaki centre will deliver 99.982% availability, a significant step up from the Newton site where the system crash occurred two years ago, due to a power outage. 

The crash affected the airline's check in and and booking systems for about six hours in October 2009, with an average delay to affected passengers of two hours.  IBM's response prompted Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe to send an internal email lambasting the company. 

But all that is water under the bridge, Air New Zealand chief financial officer Rob McDonald said.

"The relationship is very healthy and a lot of work since 2009 has gone in by both parties to make sure that didn't happen again."

He said the move from Tier 1 to Tier 3 was part of lifting the robustness of the systems.

Mr McDonald said Air New Zealand had gone to market to find the best data centre providers, with a short list of a number of possibilities.

"I won't go into who they were but you can probably guess at the sort of people."

He said IBM's bid was the most compelling, because its centre was Tier 3, and because it made a "compelling commercial offer."

Air New Zealand's IT infrastructure is spread across two data centres, one of which is run by Gen-i, which Mr McDonald said was also a good relationship.  With the Highbrook centre, Air New Zealand would be the first company in the country with its infrastructure across two Tier 3 facilities, he said.

Mr McDonald said the deal allowed Air New Zealand to lift the resilience and robustness of its infrastructure, with investment in the best available tier of data centre in New Zealand.

IBM New Zealand managing director Jennifer Moxon said IBM had worked hard in the past two years to get the right people and processes in place.

"We've had a long-standing relationship with Air New Zealand." 

Ms Moxon said both companies had moved on from the 2009 outage.

She said IBM could not comment on how much the 10 year deal was worth due to commercial sensitivity, but that the company was excited about the deal, and would work with the airline to help it expand.

The data centre, which opened in May of this year, has two clients who have publically released statements - Localist and First Mortgage Services, Ms Moxon said, and the Tier 3 centre was a "world class state of the art data centre". 

Ms Moxon said IBM did not have any plans to expand the data centre at this stage.

The 1500 sq m centre has two levels of electrical redundancy with four generators and had capacity for about 720 racks.