NQIT opts for North Queensland regional DC strategy

NQIT, which recently rebranded from ALINK with the aim of bringing the “big city” quality of services to Regional Queensland, have migrated all infrastructure to iseek’s Townsville data centre, further strengthening iseek’s position as one of Australia’s leading providers of data centre services.

The NQIT team delivers high quality technical support combined with proactive IT strategies. NQIT Managing Director, Eddie Borg says the move allows NQIT to provide a local service in North Queensland, without compromising on the scope or quality of services.

“As part of our rebranding from ALINK to NQIT, we felt it was time to not only give our North QLD customers a business that caters specifically for their needs, but it was also time to revisit our infrastructure and in particular our data centre requirements,” Mr Borg says.

“After a lengthy 20-year term in Melbourne, we wanted to see how iseek compared to the facilities we were using in both Melbourne and Brisbane.

“Having completed a full tour of the iseek facility in Townsville and a few follow up meetings with our dedicated account manager, there was no doubt in our mind that we could migrate all our infrastructure to iseek in Townsville and still continue to provide our customers all over Australia the same level of data security as before. In fact, we feel that the amazing secure facilities and personal touch provided by the iseek team in Townsville provide our team with the certainty that migrating all our Queensland data requirements to Townsville was the right choice for our customers and our future.”

Chris Smith, General Manager of Corporate Sales at iseek says NQIT’s move to a closer location is a win-win for customers.

“A local data centre provides better efficiency and higher speeds for cloud and other applications, such as backups and restoration services,” Mr Smith says.

“It also allows NQIT personnel to respond faster to hardware or other faults vs using ‘remote hands’ at a data centre located outside their area.”
Mr Smith says iseek’s extensive experience in infrastructure migration ensures the transition is a smooth one.

“Migrating infrastructure requires careful planning and a staged approach,” Mr Smith says. “The biggest concern is always downtime for the Managed Service Provider and their customers.

“iseek is one of very few data centre service providers that can offer connectivity and cloud services, in addition to data centre services. This puts us in a unique position to assist our customers by providing the necessary extra services to customers to migrate.

“iseek assists in a number of ways. Firstly, as in the case with NQIT, iseek provides a high-speed inter data centre communications during transition” Mr Smith says. “iseek can provide this through our existing national network, which connects the major data centres across Australia. Connecting the centre’s during the migration period allows the customer to treat both racks as one environment, so the migration can happen over a few days or weeks vs the risk of a ‘lift and shift” approach, which would be far riskier.

“iseek can also assist our new customers migration by allowing them to utilize our cloud for compute and storage. iseek can replicate the customers environment as a DR plan or as a full production site, until the customer has moved their physical equipment in.

“Data centres are the heart of any network and also where cloud/SaaS applications reside. iseek’s Townsville Data Centre has been built to Tier-III classification for power and cooling, using completely redundant systems for these services.

“This data centre has also been specifically built to sustain a Category 5 cyclone and the site was safe during Townsville’s recent catastrophic flood event in 2019.

“iseek can also offer completely diverse Fibre paths and fibre carriers out of the data centre to Brisbane via Coastal and Inland routes.”