New Zealand's meteorological service, Metservice, is reportedly spending in excess of NZ$1 million on building a state-of-the-art datacenter at its offices in Wellington's Botanic Garden. The datacentre is due to be completed in March.
According to Russell Turner, chief information officer, MetService will also build a backup data center in another part of the country.
As part of the upgrade, MetService will also get a faster network, 10Mb per second, compared top to the previous maximum of 512kbps before the upgrade. This is needed because the service is sending more data than ever to its international customers including the BBC and stations in Finland and Eire, receiving 15 gigabytes each day and sending 8Gb.
It also needs to access higher- resolution images from its four radar installations in New Zealand, which make for better forecasts.