Racks with reach lure Kiwi eyes
GLOBAL DATACENTRE services provider Rackspace is expected to target New Zealand customers much more seriously after the opening of its Sydney datacentre, the company’s first in Australasia, in August.
With a swath of other firms, both local and global, investing heavily in their own datacentre capabilities here and in Australia, New Zealand companies will soon be spoilt for choice.
So what factors need to be considered when choosing a hosting provider?
Mark Randall, country manager of Rackspace, Australia and New Zealand, says New Zealand customers number about 200.
The service appeals to local companies with global aspirations and to companies focused more locally but looking for high levels of 24/7 service from system and database administrators that a company of Rackspace’s global scale can provide.
Rackspace offers one-hour hardware replacement, for instance, should a server or component fail, Randall says.
Such services are hard to resource in a smaller market where scale isn’t there, he says.
Rackspace’s New Zealand customers currently include Wellington-based online accounts platform Xero, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Christchurchbased search-technology company SLI Systems.
Partners include Catalyst IT, Left Click and Exceed Online.
Meanwhile, Steve Matheson, chief operating officer and director of New Zealand-owned IT giant Datacom Group, says his impression is that Rackspace customers need to be technical to use the service effectively.
Although he hasn’t studied the offering closely, his impression is it is more like Amazon’s hosting offering than Datacom’s in providing numerous components rather than a ‘‘solution’’.
‘‘We find customers want to use a local datacentre,’’ he says. ‘‘You can’t get Aussies to use a New Zealand datacentre or vice versa.’’
Datacom has datacentres on both sides of the Tasman, which provides ‘‘emotional comfort’’ for customers.
The costs of networking and managing risk are key factors, he says.
There is a lot of uptake of cloud services from customers who have their own equipment hosted in Datacom’s datacentres.
Randall says Rackspace has no vested interest in the way customers deploy their technology, whether through hosting or through hosting on dedicated hardware, through the cloud, a hybrid cloud or private cloud. Although some of these are not yet available in the Sydney datacentre, they are coming.
‘‘Customers want to use the cloud, but not necessarily for everything,’’ he says.
‘‘We have no vested interest from a technology perspective. We want good outcomes that make them ‘sticky’ customers for Rackspace.’’
They can even use a mix of providers. Some customers may want local hosting, with Rackspace serving Australian customers, for instance, but Sydney is also a known and trusted legal jurisdiction, which should make customer adoption