Air NZ report to stay secret

Air New Zealand and IBM have completed an investigation into a data centre outage that brought down the airline's mainframe and disrupted dozens of flights on the last day of the school holidays, but they will not share the findings.

Airline spokeswoman Tracy Mills would not comment on whether it believed it owed passengers who had their travel plans disrupted an explanation, pointing instead to an apology the company issued on the day of the delays, which said IBM's performance had fallen well short of expectations.

IBM New Zealand spokeswoman Courtney Allen said the report was "highly confidential".

A Californian expert has questioned why the IBM data centre – which was previously owned by Air New Zealand – appeared reliant on a single back-up generator, that failed while scheduled maintenance was being carried out on the data centre's main power supply.

The IBM data centre and another central city data centre owned by Hewlett-Packard that runs New Zealand's main eftpos system, were spared any impact from a morning blackout in Auckland last month because they were not in the affected areas.

Data centres run by Datacom and Maxnet on the North Shore lost mains power, but both companies report back-up generators kicked in without problems.

Maxnet chief executive John Hanna said he missed news of the blackout and thought the data centre was conducting a scheduled back-up test.

Datacom chief operating officer Steve Matheson said the power cut was a good and timely test of systems at its newly commissioned $30 million data centre. "I know of one employee who was unable to get his car out of his garage due to the electric door opener being inoperable."