Hetzner South Africa has revealed that it is building a new data centre in Samrand, near Midrand, that will have a capacity of 1 200sq m when it opens its doors later this year. The data centre also has more than two hectares of space available for future development.
The new facility will house more than 12 000 servers at launch. Hetzner says it will increase the company’s national capacity and allow it to expand its range of products with the introduction of co-location services for the Gauteng market.
Hetzner, which hasn’t disclosed how much the facility is costing to build, plans to build a data centre park of five data centres. This is the first part of that development.
Standard Bank already has a data centre in Samrand, with floor space of 27 000sq m and data centre capacity of 6 000sq m. The centre opened in December 2010.
Hetzner spokesman Athena Turner says the new centre is modelled on Hetzner Online’s German facilities and has been designed to reduce the need for air conditioning, which requires large amounts of electricity.
“Whenever the ambient temperature allows for it, we will make use of direct free cooling. This reduces power consumption significantly,” Turner says. Direct free cooling is a process where water is cooled using external, ambient air and can then be used in air-conditioning and other cooling systems.
“This has been a long-term project that we’ve been preparing for,” she says. “Sourcing the right location for our facility was paramount. With our data centre in close proximity to fibre routes and a recently built power substation, we [can] maximise the benefits of the available infrastructure, allowing us to offer cost-effective hosting services.”
Turner says Internet Solutions and AfricaINX will be the primary bandwidth providers for the Samrand centre, which will “significantly increase Hetzner’s network resilience”.
The company chose Gauteng for its data centre park because the province is its “primary market”.
Turner says customers in Cape Town will benefit from the recently retrofitted data centre at Great Westerford in Newlands, which has adopted many of the same engineering principles as those used at the Samrand facility. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
