Revera builds data centre in half the time

Data and hosting company Revera has opened a new data centre it says was developed in less than half the usual time.

The company - a government infrastructure-as-a-service panel provider - has also announed plans for another 4000 sq m facilty next door to its new centre in Upper Hutt.

General manager Robin Cockayne says the company used a “just-in-time” methodology, which is more responsive to market needs and better for the environment.

Revera’s new 2500sq m Tier-3 data centre, sited in Upper Hutt’s Alexander Industrial Park, Wellington, took just six months to build.

“Building a king-sized facility and asking people to come simply doesn’t add up. In the New Zealand market you couldn’t be less green or efficient.

"Unused capacity wastes energy, and technology ages when the facility fills up slowly, isolating clients from new technologies and design improvements,” Mr Cockayne said.

The just-in-time data centre build and fit-out enlivens smaller sized pods of capacity within the larger facility, accelerating capacity commissioning and providing more opportunities to embed ongoing design and technology improvements, he says.

The newly live data centre, called ART (Alexander Rd, Trentham), contains two modules, the first of which houses racks inside individually allocated Type-R Eco-Pods.

The second, currently vacant, is fitted out and “podded” once the first module surpasses 70% capacity, introducing new technology and design tweaks that weren’t available at the outset.

The planned new "twin" facility ART2, scheduled for a neighbouring 4000sq m site, will be erected when capacity thresholds at ART are exceeded.

“With so much IT progressing to cloud formats, computing infrastructure modularity is king. We know that when module one capacity threshold is reached we can light up module two in just four-to-six months.

And we also know that the planned twin facility (ART2) will be online within nine months of the first clod being turned on the new site. So new capacity is never far away, and it embraces the very latest design and technology improvements every time it expands,” Mr Cockayne said.

Last year Revera was appointed a government infrastructure-as-a-service panel provider to government agencies, a key plank in the government’s vision for technology infrastructure-as-a-service.

The company’s fleet of data centres, known as the Revera Homeland Network (RHN), also includes data centres in Tawa, Auckland, Christchurch and Hamilton.