Vendor neutral data centre company Teraco has been making waves over the last few months, signing Cell C as an anchor tenant, opening their Johannesburg data centre and welcoming Telkom , Neotel, Vodacom, T-System, Africa INX, ECN, DFA, Web Africa and Cell C into their data centres.

Teraco has already invested around R100-million in their 500 m^2 Cape Town and 750 m^2 Johannesburg data centres, but they are planning to invest around R400-million in total to grow their total data centre space to 6700 m^2.  Construction is under way to extend their Cape Town data centre by 1200 m^2, and their Johannesburg data centre in Isando will have a 4000 m^2 capacity when completed.

Teraco MD Lex van Wyk also revealed that they have identified suitable sites for their planned Durban data centre, and he expects to start construction soon.  Teraco has very aggressive targets regarding the completion of their planned data centres:  Cape Town’s additional 1200 m^2 & Johannesburg’s second phase live by May 2010 and Durban’s new data centre live by the end of this year.

Peering and CDN

This multi-vendor environment makes it a logical peering point for local telecoms players, and Teraco MD Lex van Wyk says that this was one of the main reasons why they started NAPAfrica – a carrier neutral Layer 2 Internet exchange point (IXP).

Peering is an essential part of driving down local bandwidth costs to local ISPs through free content sharing, and Teraco is planning to drive this initiative even further by establishing a content distribution network (CDN) in its data centres.

Van Wyk said that they are talking to the biggest international players in the CDN space, and hope to make an announcement regarding a partnership soon. 

A local CDN point will mean that a fair amount of international content will be accessed locally by South African Internet users, something which can save ISPs large amounts of money on costly international bandwidth. 

Teraco is however not the only player in the market bringing international ‘closer’ to local users.   Neotel has recently announced that it is also in the process of establishing a comprehensive CDN, and Google has also quietly brought a lot of its content to local shores.

These developments make open peering even more essential to ensure that ISPs get the benefit of locally hosted content without having to pay for bandwidth from the providers to access this content. 

South African CDN servers << discussion