Carrier-neutral data centre operator Teraco will complete its giant new data centre, Riverfields in Bredell on Johannesburg’s East Rand, by the end of the year. The facility will be the largest data centre in Africa, and builds on the already expanded capacity at the company’s nearby Isando site.
TechCentral on Monday had an exclusive tour of the facility, which is still very much under construction (selected photos below). When completed, the Riverfields data centre will have about 6 000sq m of “white space” — area that will be used to house servers and related equipment — while the total size of the site is 20 000sq m.
The site, which has 24MVA of power supplied to it by the Ekurhuleni metropolitan municipality (12MVA of this IT load power, or saleable power), brings Teraco’s data centre sites countrywide to four — two in Johannesburg, one in Cape Town and one in Durban. The company has also acquired land alongside its Isando facility to build a new data centre there, though a start date for construction hasn’t been identified.
The company, which is owned by European private equity firm Permira, identified the Riverfields site because of its close proximity to reliable sources of power and the nearby location of a number of fibre routes owned by the country’s big telecommunications operators.
The operators will begin bringing their fibre into the facility from mid-October, with clients starting to deploy servers from November, according to Teraco head of interconnection and peering Michele McCann. All the big operators have already committed to bringing fibre into the Riverfields data centre.
The facility, which is costing R100m to build, brings Teraco’s total capital expenditure to date to more than R2bn, according to McCann.
She said the data centre business is virtually recession-proof. South Africa’s deteriorating economic conditions are prompting more companies to outsource their IT in third-party facilities to reduce costs. “It’s generally quite an easy sale.” — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media
