Bye bye Big Blue: IBM datacentre set to lose two customers

Big Blue is set to lose BNZ and the Ministry of Education as datacentre customers when its Newton centre closes.

The aging Newton centre is due for closure soon, and as a replacement, IBM launched its $80 million, state-of-the-art centre in East Tamaki this year. 

But both BNZ and the ministry are heading elsewhere for their data services.

BNZ chief operating officer Stephen Mockett told NBR the bank was in the process of negotiating a contract with Datacom, who opened its $35 million 700-rack centre on the North Shore in 2009.

BNZ would have to move its production hardware to a new provider when the aging Newton centre closed, Mr Mockett said.  After close to 15 years with IBM's centre, the bank had gone to the market to find the best datacentre for its needs, Mr Mockett told NBR, and had looked at a wide range of issues.

These included the overall quality of the centre, and geographical location, he said.

"Some of our disaster recovery technology actually sits roughly in the city centre and we want to make sure always that those things aren't too closely co-located."

He said financial considerations were also taken into account in the process.

"At the end of that process frankly the Datacom facility came out ahead in our view."

Negotiations with Datacom were going well and Mr Mockett was heading to Wellington with the expectation of an update on Friday.  He said the move would be a staged process which BNZ would look to have completed during the next year.

He said BNZ had a fairly close understanding of what the deal would cost, which was part of the financial decision to choose Datacom, but could not comment on specifics.  The contract would include factors such as long-term services and the ability to renew the contract.

"We need certainty of the security of our systems and the security of how well they're managed and looked after, so the time period actually always does come into that.  As you can imagine, when you're talking about a 12 month migration programme the last thing you want to be doing is shifting every 12 months."

Ministry of Education chief information officer Leanne Gibson released a statement today which said the ministry's contract with IBM had expired and it would be moving its alternate data centre from Newton to a Unisys facility, which operates a data centre in Ellerslie."

"This is because 18 months ago, prior to the all-of-government arrangements, the ministry negotiated an education cluster arrangement with Unisys relating to data hosting and housing." 

The move would start on August 12 with an expected completion date, with all services running, of August 22, Ms Gibson said. 

"We are moving 12 racks of IT equipment of which the majority is Ministry of Education pre-production and disaster recovery infrastructure.  The 12 racks contain approximately 80 servers and weigh 1500 kg."

IBM emailed NBR this afternoon, saying that client interest was strong and the company was optimistic about the Highbrook centre's growth prospects.

"Most recently Air New Zealand signed a 10-year contract for the provision of storage and facilities management of its key IT systems from the centre.

Plans for the migration of clients from the Newton Data Centre to Highbrook are well underway and are expected to complete by early 2012."