Tag Archives: sky tower

Auckland Sky Tower

For my last day at work, I was lucky enough to get a task to go up the Auckland Sky Tower to perform some maintenance in the data center up there – despite living in Auckland for the past 12 months, I hadn’t yet gone up the sky tower; no thanks to the excessively high fees to visit the viewing deck.

The Auckland Sky Tower Data Center is located high up on levels 47 and 48 and is a popular location for routers and peering, thanks to the great line of sight range for any wireless telcos or microwave point-to-point links and is also the home of the Auckland Peering Exchange.

It’s one of the weirder data centers I’ve been in to thanks to the floor to ceiling windows with sun streaming in and the odd bungy jumper flying past the windows on the northern side.

I got some great pictures out over the city from up there – sorry no rack pictures however, didn’t want to upset anyone by posting pictures of their racked equipment.

They’re beaming the bits into my brain!

Looking out over the Viaduct with Takapuna in the distance.

Looking over the CBD – the line in the middle of the picture is the bungy jump wire.

Middle of the CBD and the port. Devonport in the distance, with Rangitoto behind that.

Weird looking microwave transmitters.

Auckland harbor bridge and the viaduct.

Motorway to the south of the harbor bridge.

Mmmmm non-ionising radiation :-D

When I buy a house I’m totally installing cable run trays like this for all my servers.

Dreamiest blogger ever!

Panorama!

Over all a very cool trip and considering it’s free to go up (if you have equipment racked there) and parking is free for data center customers in the sky tower, it’s the best value observation level around. ;-)

Early Morning Auckland

My good friend @LGnome was transiting via Auckland and had a day to spend up here to see the sights. Naturally I delivered with one near side-swipe, two cars running a red light right in front of us and congested roads.

I also had to get up early (06:00) to get to the airport, before heading into the CBD to get some decent breakfast and coffee and took a few early morning pics – it’s amazing how much nicer Auckland is earlier in the morning when the roads are dead.

Because Shaky Isles doesn’t seem to open before 08:00 on a Sunday, we went for a wander around Auckland for a bit first and I got a few decent pics with my trusty professional grade photographer setup.

Good morning Mr Sun!

I do like Wynyard Quarter's mix of resturants and industry, get some pretty big ships in there at times.

"Gateway To The Cloud" (punny since the Sky Tower is one of NZ's main network exchanges)

No early morning is complete without coffee from Shaky Isles. :-D

Up in Mt Victoria, not a lot of traffic (car or boat) early Sunday morning.