Hot data centre porn

For those of you who like your big iron, some photos inside Datacom's new Kapua data centre in Hamilton, which is paired with a second facility in Auckland, Orbit.

The company, majority-owned by Rich Lister John Houldsworth, puts the budget for the two data centres at $90 million.

Located in "geologically sound" Hamilton, the Tier 3+ Kapua is Datacom's ninth data centre across Australia and NZ. It covers 11,000 square metres of land and has the capacity to house over 920 racks across five data floors with "room for further significant expansion."

The centre is designed to us up to 5.8 megawatts of power (a whopping amount by most terms, but a tiny faction of what would be freed up if the bluff smelter is closed; read: Can we replace Tiwai smelter with a giant data centre?).

Kapua was opened by ICT Minister Amy Adams on May 1. It's part of data centre boom that has included IBM's new $60 million data centre in East Tamaki (see some pics of that here) and Telecom expanding its capacity by dropping nearly $100 million on Revera.

The action is being fueled by the cloud computing and online services boom (Kapua is Maori for cloud) - and the fact a few older centres are getting pretty long in the tooth.