Spark and University of Waikato join forces on cloud services project

Spark customer director for enterprise and government Mark Beder (left) and University of Waikato chief information officer Eion Hall discuss major upgrades to data facilities on the campus that will benefit Hamilton businesses.

Spark is spending $15 million upgrading data facilities in Hamilton.

The company is building three large data centres in Auckland, with regional centres like Hamilton, Tauranga and Dunedin receiving “edge” facilities to enable faster access to data.

In its announcement on Tuesday, Spark said it was partnering with the University of Waikato and would take over the management of the university’s data centre, and make significant further investment to upgrade the site as a key edge data centre for its business customers.

It would also invest in a “new, modern fibre backbone” from Ōtorohonga to Te Kauwhata, to serve the needs of the fast-growing Hamilton East and Ruakura area.

Spark customer director for enterprise and government Mark Beder said the company had a strategy to invest in data centre capacity in New Zealand.

“Building a network of regional data centres is an important part of these plans.”

He said they were experiencing “exponential growth” in data, with ongoing migration of data to the cloud.

Businesses were also embracing new technologies such as generative AI.

“Access to high-quality, resilient computing infrastructure such as cloud services located in data centres is critical to the competitiveness of New Zealand and our regions,” Beder said.

University of Waikato chief information officer Eion Hall said the university was modernising its IT and cloud infrastructure, and the partnership with Spark and associated investment in new infrastructure on campus would put the university “at the heart of cloud growth in the Waikato”.

“This partnership also enables us to focus on our technology strategy, and utilising Spark’s capabilities as a leading data centre operator, strategically supporting our business application and ICT infrastructure projects.”

Spark’s data centre strategy included plans to develop three large-scale data centre campuses in Auckland’s North Shore, CBD (Aotea), and South (Takanini), while continuing to invest in “metro sites” in Wellington and Christchurch.

Edge data centres, such as the one in Hamilton, were located closer to where the data was being used, reducing the time it took for data to travel back and forth and enabling faster access and better performance for certain applications and services.

Spark and the University of Waikato had been working with the Research Education Advanced Network New Zealand (REANNZ) to ensure data centre sites at the university and Spark’s Takanini data centre facility in Auckland were connected to New Zealand’s national research, science and education digital network. That network was designed to “seamlessly connect” more than 120 networks globally to enable researchers to collaborate.