By ADAM GIFFORD
The Wellington City Council is shifting its disaster recovery facilities to a new $10 million data centre being built by Hosting and Datacentre Services (HdS) in Tawa, on the northern edge of the city.
IT manager Alma Hong said $700,000 had been budgeted this year for set-up costs, but
future funding was still to be worked out.
"We are taking a phased approach," Hong said. "Year one we are setting up the basic infrastructure so if there is an earthquake, staff can get their office productivity applications - people can do a lot with what is on their file and print drives and email.
"In years two and three we will be looking at the other critical business systems we need to recover, [such as] the financial and regulatory services."
Hong said the council initially planned its own disaster recovery centre.
"We didn't want it in the CBD, but we wanted it within the Wellington City boundary, so we targeted Tawa because of its geological stability," she said.
"It happened HdS was also looking at a Tawa site, so they approached us about a partnership."
She said HdS would host the council's infrastructure equipment, which would be managed remotely by council staff.
"All our back end servers and networks will operate out of HdS," said Hong. "Our existing production environment in the civic centre doesn't change."
The council has about 50 IT staff and an operational budget of $6.7 million a year.
It has a large storage area network, which will be mirrored by HdS.
"We will use the disater site as back-up in non-disaster situations," said Hong. "Disaster we define as an earthquake.
"Non-disaster is something else that may happen in the computer room, such as a fire."
The system should by live by August.
HdS is the company formed when managers Wayne Norrie and Roger Cockayne bought a 51 per cent stake in Hitachi's New Zealand operation.
The Tawa datacentre replaces the company's existing Wellington datacentre on Queens Wharf.
