Internet Solutions upgrades Cape Town data centre

Issued by Stone Soup for Internet Solutions
Johannesburg, 22 Aug 2007

Internet Solutions (IS), a leading converged communications services provider, today opened its upgraded International Data Centre (IDC) in Cape Town.

The 800m^2 power room, installed by Dimension Data, provides increased capacity to ensure 100% uptime for IS customers.

Greg Montjoie, manager for Hosted Solutions at IS, says an additional 300m^2 data centre space is planned for September.

"After the power outages experienced in Cape Town during last year we wanted to ensure we could maintain IS' 100% uptime record and this called for an upgrade to our power plant."

With no disruption to customer services during the nine-month project, Dimension Data installed:

* Three 1 250KVA generators;
* Nine 400KVA Uniterrupted Power Supplies (UPS);
* Two 9 000 litre diesel tanks; and
* Two cooling towers weighing 10 tons each.

"We estimate this power upgrade will handle our needs for at least the next 10 years," says Montjoie. "And although our customers have never experienced an outage of service in the IS' Cape Town IDC over the past five years, it's clear that the demands on the local power grid may prove problematic in the future.

"Upgrading the utilities in Cape Town also prompted a 300m^2 data centre space expansion. However, due to increased business demands, it is already fully allocated so we are doubling this starting in September."

The upgrade of data centre space involved installing a world-class cooling system and deploying state-of-the-art structuring cabling and more than 5 000 network points.

Concludes Montjoie: "As with all our data centres, IS is constantly improving hosting services for our customers and that includes the supporting infrastructures."

IS Hosting offers a comprehensive application hosting service as well as enterprise scale co-location space. Corporate ERP and CRM systems, e-commerce transaction systems, Web sites, DR environments, networking equipment and video and audio streaming servers are all hosted in a fully-managed, redundant and fault-tolerant environment. Connected directly to a super-fast network used by the biggest online business community in South Africa, IS currently has more than 144 hosting clients in Cape Town alone.

Internet Solutions

Internet Solutions (IS) is a leading provider of end-to-end connectivity solutions and related services across the African continent. The people at IS are passionate about constantly innovating and delivering solutions and services that are relevant and critical to its customers. These services are built on a world-class, secure, resilient infrastructure, delivered according to global best practices and effected in partnership with the world's leading technology vendors. It is through these services and solutions that IS creates a competitive edge for its customers' communication needs, and promote sustainable business growth.

The business was founded in 1992 on the principle of developing a robust infrastructure in order for corporates and other organisations to communicate. Since then, IS has established itself as a leader in this space, attracting over 80% of South Africa's top businesses as clients. From listed companies to non-governmental organisations, local and national government and smaller companies, IS is enabling and evolving communications to meet the business needs of thousands of customers.

Today the company enjoys a leadership position as it delivers services, including: hosting, access, security solutions, virtual private network, mobile solutions, VOIS, African solutions, broadband, and application services. Recent growth in the African economy has resulted in IS spreading its services across all parts of the continent, as clients demand reliable and robust networking connectivity in the African market.

Internet Solutions has been certified as a Level 4 contributor to BEE (100% compliant), and has earned an impressive collection of accolades and awards.

Partnerships with major global players such as Cisco and Microsoft are also fundamental to IS, and as such Internet Solutions was recently awarded Microsoft Gold Certification in the Hosting specialisation for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (Hosted Exchange and SharePoint) and Managed Hosting Solutions - the first South African company to achieve this accreditation. Similarly in 2002, IS was certified as a Cisco Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), the first company outside of the US to be awarded this accolade.

For more, visit us on www.is.co.za.

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Internet Solutions upgrades Cape Town data centre

New utility plant and increased data centre space.