Learning from the Air NZ data centre outage

Maxnet’s CEO John Hanna highlighted the importance of updating legacy data centers and having proper backup procedures in place in the wake of the Air NZ outage.

Regarding the recent outage he said: “It should be a wake-up call for senior management. While backup systems incur additional cost, they are absolutely necessary.”

Maxnet Marketing Manager Wayne Voss said that many data centers were built in the 70s and 80s and those upgrading is challenging, especially in regards to power capacity.

“Today’s requirements were simply not in the contemplation of the people who designed them,” he said. “In some cases, the power utilities simply don’t have sufficient network capacity in the location of the data center to facilitate a power upgrade.”

Maxnet, therefore, is promoting its 200-rack data center, which was upgraded five years ago to improve the power and cooling infrastructure.

“We were very fortunate we made the decision to upgrade when we did in anticipation of today’s customer requirements,” Voss said. “We’ve secured a significant amount of business on the back of the guaranteed 99.99% uptime we can now provide, and the density of equipment we’re capable of supporting – up to 30kW per rack.”

In the last two years Maxnet has invested $2 million on additional infrastructure capacity and capability.