HDS technology offers long-distance mirroring service

By ADAM GIFFORD

Hitachi reseller and IT services company Hosting and Datacentre Services (HDS) is gearing up to offer an asynchronous mirroring service between Auckland and Wellington, making use of the 200 terabyte capacity of its new $10 million Albany data centre.

Chief executive officer Roger Cockayne said new switch technology from Nishan Systems allowed data replication over unprecedented distances. HDS pushed earlier technology to its limits, creating mirrors more than 30km from main data centres.

However, that technology, which uses the Fibre Channel protocol through a dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) switch and shoots it down dark fibre, is limited by distance and price.

In contrast, the Nishan switch converts data from the Fibre Channel protocol of the storage area network (SAN) environment to internet protocol (TCP/IP) so it can be transmitted over gigabit ethernet - which is subject to a far more competitive market.

"We have offered this to Telecom and TelstraClear," Cockayne said. "We are happy to be wholesalers for this service."

He said insurance company Tower was the driver for the project, as it wanted to be able to start processing claims as rapidly as possible if some misfortune were to strike the capital.

"It pays for itself in the costs saved by keeping a mirror rather than relying on backups - it can take days to restore a multi-gigabit database."

HDS has grown rapidly in the year since Cockayne and fellow Hitachi executive Wayne Norrie bought the New Zealand assets of Hitachi Data Systems, leaving Hitachi with a 49 per cent stake in their new company. Turnover increased 38 per cent to $17 million in the year to March and earnings before interest and tax was up 90 per cent.

Services, including application and data hosting, now account for about 80 per cent of revenue. The new data centre is built on HDS' Virtual Datacentre (VDC) architecture.

The VDC, which Cockayne said cost $4.5 million to develop, includes an enterprise class network, security blanket, systems management tools, utilities and storage enterprise network.

In the middle of this infrastructure are the play pens - individual servers running customer applications on multiple operating systems.

HDS has built a second Virtual Datacentre, essentially a SAN and some servers controlled out of Auckland and co-housed at Synergy's Wellington datacentre. It is now building centres in Australia.

Customers include Tower, United Networks, The Building Depot and independent software providers such as payroll specialist PayGlobal.