Pan-African telecommunications operator Liquid Telecom has opened what it’s calling the largest data centre in East Africa, in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi. The data centre currently occupies four floors, with 500sqm of usable whitespace and 160 racks per floor.
The facility has been built by a new Liquid Telecom subsidiary, East Africa Data Centre Ltd.
The carrier-neutral facility already provides services to numerous banks, mobile network operators, Internet service providers and cloud computing solutions providers.
East Africa Data Centre is an independent company within the Liquid Telecom group, with a separate management team from its sister companies, which include Liquid Telecom Kenya.
Liquid claims the facility is the largest and most sophisticated in East Africa, offering space for dedicated hosting, interconnection services, colocation, disaster recovery, network-based services, applications and cloud services to carriers, network providers and enterprises. It serves customers across Africa, not only those in East Africa, the company says.
The centre is connected to the backbone and metro fibre of multiple carriers. These include nearly all of Kenya’s local carriers and international carriers such as Tata, Level3 and Seacom. Companies using the data centre can choose from any of these providers for connectivity.
The data centre guarantees at least 99,982% availability. In order to ensure uninterrupted power supply, its mains feed of 11kV is supported by two diesel generators.
Meanwhile, Liquid Telecom has signed a partnership agreement with Tanzania Telecommunications Company Ltd (TTCL) to interconnect with its fibre network in Tanzania.
Liquid Telecom Kenya has built a fibre link from Nairobi to Namanga on the border of Kenya and Tanzania. Traffic terminating in Tanzania will now pass onto TTCL’s fibre network. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
