Datacom won the DCD Asia Pacific region Data Centre Operations Team of the Year Award for successfully delivering four simultaneous large-scale build and upgrade projects, while ensuring 100% uptime and no customer disruption, at an Award ceremony in Singapore last night.
Receiving the Award at the ceremony, Andrew Green, Associate Director, Data Centre Operations said it was a testament to the expertise of the Datacom team.
“On behalf of our team I am delighted to receive the APAC region DCD Award for Operations Team of the Year and celebrate the delivery of one of the region’s biggest data centre projects with the goal of upgrading capacity without disrupting customer access.
“Applying our collective experience in managing data centres, our Operations team has successfully achieved four wide-scale build and upgrade projects while ensuring 100% uptime and no customer disruption. We are proud of our Datacom people who have proven they’re the best in the industry.”
Datacom has four data centres across New Zealand, all running with fault tolerant availability, robust security and full compliance to international standards. The data centres have second to none sustainability with a zero ozone depletion and zero global warming potential of the facilities and capability to transform IT systems.
Now in its eleventh year, the DCD Awards are the region’s 'Oscars' of the data centre industry, celebrating cutting-edge projects and expertise. Winning against other data centre teams in China, Australia and New Zealand, the Datacom team won the Operations Team category for their capability to deliver four large-scale rebuild and expansion projects simultaneously across data centres in four cities throughout New Zealand while maintaining continuous data centre services to its customers.
The Datacom team completed the rebuild and expansion in a live environment while normal services could continue without interruption.
“Datacom had a vision for its data centre upgrades,” said Green. “We wanted to expand available rack space and upgrade the facilities to meet modern computing demands for the next 15 years, as well as be prepared for forecast growth. The technical specifications for the data centres were demanding and these data centres must be secure, robust and available 24/7, which means they must be operated under tight processes, with a constant view to maintaining 100% uptime, which we achieved.”
The major difficulty faced by the team was working in live data centres and having to develop a methodology that allowed for the changes to be made without disruption to customer needs. In order to deliver on this requirement, the team had a continual balancing act to coordinate technical, staff and customer impacts, delivering each piece in a specific order with dependencies mapped to customer needs.
The projects involved upgrading power systems to move off old power supply to new supply, and to new racks, without any system outages; the implementation of new data centre systems; Uptime Institute Recertifications which achieved world class scores; and energy efficiency improvements which will fulfil customer sustainability goals.