Teraco Data Environments has announced it has started construction on a huge new data centre at River Fields Bredell, 20km north of its current Isando campus on Johannesburg’s East Rand.
The 24MW new data centre will be even bigger than the expanded 20MW Isando facility.
Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk said the Bredell site will bring the company’s total power supply to 50MW by the end of 2017.
“Teraco will be comparable to global data centres and, by a large margin, will be Africa’s biggest data centre provider,” he said.
The expanded Isando site will be completed by December 2016, with the Bredell site scheduled for completion in September 2017.
As part of the expansion to Bredell, Teraco will extend fast-growing Internet exchange point NAPAfrica to the new facility.
Van Wyk said key trends such as cloud computing, enterprise outsourcing, the Internet of things, online content and online storage are all driving demand for new data centre capacity.
Standard Bank’s global head of telecommunications and media, Nina Triantis, said in an interview with TechCentral last week that data centres are mushrooming across Africa as telecoms operators and independent infrastructure providers like Teraco build facilities to cater for rapidly expanding demand from African consumers for cloud-based services, including video on demand.
“The data centre hype is finally being realised in Africa,” Triantis said. “People have been talking about data centres for a long time, but in sub-Saharan Africa — outside South Africa — the lack of infrastructure and power has meant it has been difficult.”
There also hasn’t been big demand from international players such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook, but there are signs that this is starting to change as these companies turn increasingly to emerging markets for future growth, she added.
In South Africa, the data centre market has always been better developed than in the rest of the region, but demand continues to expand thanks to a growing trend by big companies, including banks, to outsource IT operations. This is fuelling demand for data centre capacity and enterprise cloud offerings, she said. — © 2016 NewsCentral Media
