Finnish multinational telecommunications firm Nokia has signed a partnership deal with Africa Data Centres, to enable the cloud-neutral data centre provider to offer high-capacity interconnection services to its customers across multiple African countries.
The announcement was made in Cape Town today at AfricaCom 2022.
As part of the deal, Nokia will provide its 7250 IXR interconnect router platforms with 400G-enabled interfaces to Africa Data Centres, billed as the continent’s largest provider of interconnected, carrier- and cloud-neutral data centre facilities.
Africa Data Centres, which is part of the Cassava Technologies group of companies, has made an investment of $500 million that will see it build 10 interconnected, cloud- and carrier-neutral data centres in 10 countries across the African continent.
The investment, according to the company, is being funded through new equity and facilities from leading development finance institutions and multilateral organisations.
“Connectivity is the bedrock of the digital economy, and our customers expect the very best interconnection services between our data centre locations,” said Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres.
“We selected Nokia because its solution provides MEF 3.0-compliant connectivity, giving our customers scalable, reliable and secure access to their applications, data and workloads – wherever they are located.”
In addition to the router platform, Africa Data Centres will deploy the Nokia Network Services Platform (NSP) to automate the deployment and management of connectivity services.
The NSP, according to the company, will help Africa Data Centres accelerate time-to-market for connectivity services that can be easily consumed by its customers, allowing them to deploy workloads in any location and transparently interconnect them reliably and securely.
“The automation enabled by the Nokia NSP simplifies service implementation and deployment, allowing our customers to create flexible, scalable and reliable ICT infrastructure more easily and cost-effectively,” noted Durvasula.
Nokia creates mission-critical networking solutions across mobile, fixed and cloud networks, to help organisations build a secure, reliable, scalable and flexible communications infrastructure to serve their operations.
“Increasing adoption of cloud applications is driving the need for more scalable, flexible and automated data centre interconnection,” said Manolo Ortiz, senior VP for Webscale Business EMEA at Nokia.
“We are delighted that Africa Data Centres has selected the Nokia 7250 IXR platforms to interconnect its data centres. Our solution ensures it has the capacity to meet the future demands of its customers, while reducing operational costs and increasing operations efficiency through automation.”
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