Growth of data centres in South Africa

South Africa’s data centre market is growing rapidly, with industry players building bigger and more advanced data centres.

The list of companies with facilities in the country continues to grow after Teraco kicked off South Africa’s carrier-neutral data centre revolution, and Microsoft and Huawei launched a cloud presence in the country.

Companies like Africa Data Centres, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) through Dimension Data, Vantage Data Centres, WIOCC,  and Oracle have all been investing in local data centres.

These companies have invested billions of rands in their facilities.

Among the biggest recent investments was Vantage Data Centres’ R15 billion Waterfall City facility, completed in July 2022.

Vantage Data Centres said its completion came more than ten months ahead of schedule.

Some of the most recent and significant developments in the country’s data centre market are summarised below.

Africa Data Centre’s Samrand and Midrand data centres

Africa Data Centres acquired Standard Bank’s Samrand data centre in May 2020, after having begun the process a month earlier.

The company said the facility has sufficient power — 30MW worth — and space for significant expansion.

MyBroadband spoke to Africa Data Centres group executive for IT and partners Angus Hays who said the Samrand facility is one of few certified tier 4 facilities on the African continent.

“Tier 4 is at the top of the list. It’s basically the benchmark in redundancy and availability,” he said.

“A tier 4 facility has fully redundant infrastructure, and that guarantees the highest availability and performance.”

He added that the data centre features 6,000 square meters of white space across four data halls, each of which can take up to 600 server racks.

The company’s Midrand facility features 9,000 square meters of white space spread across eight data halls.

Teraco completes phase 1 of its multi-billion rand Cape Town data centre

Teraco completed construction on the first phase of its multi-billion rand Brackenfell Data Centre (CT2) in Cape Town in October 2021.

The facility is the biggest data centre in the province, featuring 18MW of critical IT power load across 8,000 square meters of data hall space.

The Brackenfell facility is linked to all other Teraco-owned data systems through a web of network operators making up “Platform Teraco”.

Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo said the company expects to build CT3 within the next five years.

Acronis’ launches cloud facilities in South Africa

Acronis announced that its Cyber Cloud Data Centre in Johannesburg — its first in South Africa — was up and running in January 2022.

“A local presence is a necessity for modern cloud businesses, and we are proud to deliver the Acronis Cyber Cloud Data Center in South Africa,” Acronis’s regional general manager for the Middle East and Africa, Peter French, said.

The Johannesburg facility is one of 111 being deployed by Acronis and provides its service provider partners access to cyber protection services they can use to build new products.

Oracle launches Johannesburg cloud region

Cloud services provider Oracle’s first African, and by extension South African, cloud region went live in January 2022.

“The Johannesburg region is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which enables customers to easily migrate IT workloads and data platforms to the cloud or build new cloud-native applications,” Oracle said.

Companies expected to benefit from the new region include the Airports Company South Africa, Government Pensions Administrative Agency, and Telkom.

NTT and Dimension Data’s Johannesburg 1 facility nears completion

An NTT spokesperson in June said that the company’s Johannesburg 1 Data Centre is approaching completion and is expected to open before the end of 2022.

NTT-owned Dimension Data and Growthpoint Properties are developing the facility.

The Johannesburg 1 data centre is located within the Centralpoint Innovation District in Midrand, and it will feature 6,000 square meters of hall space and offer 12MW of critical IT load.

Vantage Data Centres opens first African data centre

Vantage Data Centres opened its Johannesburg (JNB1) data centre — its first in Africa — in July 2022. Construction started last year.

The facility currently offers 16MW of critical IT capacity across 12,000 square meters of hall space, and Vantage said the campus would include 80MW of IT capacity over 60,000 square meters once fully developed.

The campus is situated in Waterfall City, Midrand.

Vantage said it was designed with its commitment to sustainability in mind, and the company signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with SolarAfrica in June.


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