Teraco expands South African digital infrastructure campus
Teraco Data Environments has completed the JB3 data centre facility, located within the Isando Campus in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, South Africa.
This multi-billion-rand facility represents a strategic addition to Platform Teraco, offering enterprises a scalable platform for IT infrastructure deployment while sustaining performance, reliability, security, and the widest network choice.
JB3 comprises 45,000sqm of building structure, 12,000sqm of data hall space, and 29MW of critical power load. When combined with the existing Isando Campus facilities, the critical power load totals 40MW across the campus data centre footprint with room for further growth.
Jan Hnizdo, CEO, Teraco, says that the latest Isando Campus expansion meets the growing demand by both cloud providers and enterprises for data centre capacity and enables Teraco to offer highly resilient and secure colocation facilities while working towards ensuring its long-term vision of enabling digital transformation across the African continent.
“This investment also aligns with the support we pledged to the South African Government’s investment drive and our commitment to investing billions of Rands into South Africa’s digital infrastructure," he said.
Teraco has over 600 clients, including key networks, cloud providers, global content, managed IT service providers, and direct access to Africa’s largest Internet exchange, NAPAfrica; within its multitude of data centres.
With over 200 telcos within Platform Teraco providing connectivity to Africa, Hnizdo says that enterprises are now accelerating their digital transformation strategies and placing a greater focus on cloud adoption strategies.
“Teraco is making significant investments in providing access to digital infrastructure that is both resilient and highly flexible. This offers enterprises the ability to scale as network strategies evolve in a world where fast and secure interconnection with strategic business partners and cloud on-ramps are a source of competitive advantage.”
With a direct private connection to all leading cloud providers, enterprises can deploy in the most latency efficient, secure and resilient manner possible. Enterprises can also deploy their public, private and hybrid cloud strategies from the Teraco platform.
Hnizdo says Teraco has continued to see growth in cloud adoption strategies making its role significant for those who need access to robust digital infrastructure. “Our clients use the data centre to scale their IT infrastructure, adopt hybrid and multi-cloud architectures and interconnect with strategic business partners within the Teraco ecosystem. Over the last year, we have seen a 48% increase in direct interconnects to public cloud on-ramps, reflecting the increasing trend of cloud adoption by enterprises.”
The Africa data center construction market is witnessing significant growth, especially in South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, and Nigeria. The growing internet population has been a strong growth factor, and government agencies are looking to improve their digital economies. Nigeria's market is set to grow at a CAGR of 17% to 2026, while the Kenya data center market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 12.36% in the same period.
The development of hyperscale data centers is likely to adopt 2N CRAC or CRAH units, whereas other facilities are expected to go for N+N systems, according to ResearchAndMarkets.
The facilities are built with flexible designs, in which additional or high-power capacity units can be incorporated within days or weeks, depending on the customer's requirement. Chillers are used to facilitate water-based cooling, whereas the adoption of a water-based cooling technique is experiencing strong growth, contributing to a sizable share of the Africa data center construction market.
"The market also lacks a skilled workforce for data center construction and operations, where the definite investments in greenfield projects are low. Hence, most service providers are developing modular facilities," it notes.
The 2Africa consortium, comprising China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, stc, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC, recently announced the addition of four new branches to the 2Africa cable, which will extend 2Africa's connectivity to the Seychelles, the Comoros Islands, and Angola, and bring a new landing to south-east Nigeria.
