This is what a Teraco data centre looks like

I recently toured Teraco’s JB3 data centre (DC), one of my most fascinating experiences while working for MyBroadband. I expected data centres to be boring, but it was anything but.

Before the tour started, BusinessTech journalist Seth Thorne and I arrived at the Isando campus near OR Tambo International, passing through two large security gates to get onto the premises.

The building itself was massive. It’s a four-story building, each floor measuring 6 metres from slab to slab.

JB3 is one of seven DCs owned by Teraco in South Africa: two in the Western Cape, four in Gauteng, and one in KwaZulu-Natal.

Before the tour started, we were given a rundown of the facility’s key metrics. Its critical IT load is 30MW, which refers to the power consumption of the information technology equipment necessary to run the DC.

The DC’s total power consumption is 60MW. The additional 30MW is used to cool the IT equipment.

The concept of a DC was illustrated using a fridge analogy. Teraco essentially sells fridge space to businesses that want to store their food, or in this case, data.

The stored data must be accessed through the Internet, so the computers that store it are always running, hence the need for cooling.

Due to the amount and consistency of power needed to operate a DC, there is no room for load-shedding. Therefore, to maintain as much uptime as possible, Teraco currently relies on diesel generators for power when it is load-shedding.

The building’s roof was covered in solar panels. However, this rooftop solar installation only produces about 1MW of power for JB3.

The company is building a 120MW solar plant in the Free State to create a more sustainable solution to this problem.

South Africa has also recently announced that it wants data centres to reduce their dependency on the grid as part of the National Policy on Cloud and Data, part of an initiative to incentivise water and energy conservation.

“Currently, South Africa faces electricity supply challenges. Given that data centres operate 24 hours a day and consume vast amounts of electricity, reliance solely on the national grid may be insufficient,” the policy states.

However, keeping a DC up and running requires more than your 5.5kW genny and a bit of solar. Teraco’s JB3 has 33 64-litre Mitsubishi V16 engines with an output of 1.5MW each.

They are constantly heated to decrease the time it takes to switch from electricity supplied by Eskom to generated power, which is 20 seconds.

What is most interesting about the power outage precautions taken is how there is an N+1 redundancy for everything.

This means that whatever is needed to supply 60MW of power will have a backup. This includes generators, uninterrupted power supplies (UPSs), or cooling systems.

Cold air is used to cool the IT hardware. Teraco combines water-cooled air with filtered ambient air to do this.

JB3 needs around 300,000 litres of water for cooling. However, all the water is kept in a closed loop, so no water is wasted.

Cooling units are used to cool the air by removing heat and expelling it outside the building. Each cooling unit consumes about 1.4MW each.

This air is then fed into the DC’s data halls. Massive rooms filled with servers.

The data hall we were shown was co-located, meaning that multiple of Teraco’s clients shared the space. They all buy as many racks as they need.

This would seem obvious, but we were told that some clients request whole data halls and even entire DCs.

The room is lined with cabinets containing server racks. Each line of cabinets has its back to what is known as a hot aisle. The hot aisle consists of two rows of cabinets with their backs facing one another.

Cool air travels into the cabinets, and the hot air is flushed into the hot aisle, where it is sucked up and transported away.

Temperature fluctuations, humidity, and other crucial metrics are monitored 24 hours a day from the DC’s network operations centre.

Due to the sensitivity of the data within the DCs, photographs were strictly forbidden inside. We were also told that no images of the inside could be provided by Teraco for this exact reason.

However, we were given aerial photographs of the DC to demonstrate its size.

An aerial view of JB3. Credit: Teraco

The street view of JB3. Credit: Teraco

CT2 in Brackenfell, Cape Town. Credit: Teraco

Solar panels on the roof of CT2. Credit: Teraco

An aerial view of CT2. Credit: Teraco