New Zealand wholesale fixed line operator, Chorus, has expanded the colocation capacity of a data center in Auckland.
The company this week said it had expanded its Mount Eden data center in partnership with Vertiv, which designed and implemented a 23-rack hot aisle containment system.
With a scalable power range of 50kW to 250kW, the facility uses refrigerant-based air-cooling modules, UPS systems, and an environmental monitoring unit.
Colocation product manager at Chorus, Mohammad Hadi, said: “Mount Eden was our pilot build in 2015 and every rack in that facility has since sold out. To give our customers room to play in today’s digital ecosystem, we needed to expand our capacity in Auckland where customers needed it. This demand led to the significant expansion of the Mount Eden site.”
He added: “Sites such as Mount Eden used to be occupied by large, legacy copper telco equipment. They’re now being replaced with smaller, more sustainable fiber alternatives, and Vertiv is helping us free up new space to put it to other uses.”
The company offers colocation services from four existing and repurposed metro-based telephone exchange facilities. Chorus has ‘EdgeCentre’ colocation facilities [to be confused with the Australian firm Edge Centres] currently available at Mt Eden in Auckland, Otumoetai in Tauranga, Courtenay Place in Wellington, and Avonhead in Christchurch.
The company says it is looking at further potential data center growth via its estimated 600 telephone exchange buildings to expand regional access to computing infrastructure.
Mark Langford, head of New Zealand at Vertiv, said: “We’re proud to offer Chorus confidence throughout its colocation journey. With robust Edge solutions, the company is inviting innovation within its existing real estate and trusts our leading design in facilitating scalability alongside the colocation demand curve.”
New Zealand-based Chorus is a telecoms company spun off from the incumbent telco Telecom New Zealand (now known as Spark) in 2011. The expansion follows Chorus’ plans to retire its copper network and become an all-fiber company, announced in May last year.
Chorus is not the first company to repurpose existing sites. In August last year, Cogent Communications turned former Sprint switching sites into a sizable colocation data center portfolio.
