Edge data centres are proliferating across Africa, addressing the multi-pronged challenges of fast-tracking coverage, refreshing and transforming data centre infrastructure, achieving more agility in roll-out and reducing content latency across the continent.
This is according to Dr Ayotunde Coker, CEO of Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a WIOCC Group Company, Africa's leading provider of comprehensive, converged, integrated core digital infrastructure solutions and managed network services.
Addressing the coverage gap
Dr Coker says Africa has lagged the world in terms of digital infrastructure coverage, but the continent is catching up.
“For example, Metropolitan London has a population of around 15 million, compared to Africa’s 1.5 billion. Yet Africa has only around 30% of the compute data centre availability of London. South Africa, with around 60 million people, has only half the data centre availability of Amsterdam, which has a population of around eight million,” he says.
South Africa itself has over 50% of all of the data centre infrastructure installed in Africa, and the anchor point of that is Johannesburg, he says.
“However, progress is being made in terms of providing that infrastructure across Africa. We are currently building a flagship data centre in Lagos, Nigeria, which is becoming a data centre hub in Africa. Around 70 to 80 megawatts of data centre infrastructure is under construction in Lagos now. Other hubs are emerging in Nairobi, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco,” he says.
At the same time, Tier 2 data centres are being developed to serve markets that do not need data centres at the same significant scale. These edge data centres expand coverage and reduce latency, he says.
Defining the edge
Dr Coker explains that edge data centres are not defined by size, but rather by their size relative to a core data centre.
“If you have a 100-megawatt data centre, and that's a core data centre, and a 10-megawatt data centre further down the line, that's an edge. We have 30 edge data centres across South Africa, some with only 15 racks and 50 kilowatts of power.
“With our connectivity company, we have national long-distance networks across South Africa. We also have our clients who provide interconnectivity and services to customers in different parts of the country. At those critical points of data concentration, we can put an edge data centre that serves as the point of presence of our networks and our clients’ networks.
“We are expanding core data centres in Lagos, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. We also recently opened a half megawatt data centre in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. This was the first one in the whole of Congo. It's been live for three months, and in just that space of time, it's transformed the digital infrastructure ecosystem in the city,” he says.
“We also see companies like Wingu and Raxio building in the ‘Tier 2’ markets of Angola, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. So, step by step, the sector is delivering more digital infrastructure across the continent. On the back of that, Africa is getting more digital unicorns in the marketplace.”
Bringing down latency
Dr Coker says the expansion of data centres at the edge are crucial for reducing latency in an increasingly demanding market where low latency is a competitive advantage.
“Latency on traffic served from London to Johannesburg may be as high as 120 milliseconds. From Lagos to Cape Town, the latency would be around 60 milliseconds. However, modern applications and users may require latency as low as around 3 milliseconds. In some instances, 10 milliseconds may be acceptable, but by and large, once you start to hit the 40, 50 millisecond levels, it really starts to become an issue architecturally. When people become used to higher quality and a much better experience through low latency, their standards and expectations change around what’s acceptable. That's why you need to have the compute locally within the country and at the edge,” he says.
Greening digital
Edge data centres also support efforts to reduce the environmental impact of data centres, reducing carbon emissions by minimising the distance data needs to travel.
“We can also architect the environment to ensure that resource-intensive infrastructure that isn’t latency sensitive can sit at a location closest to the greenest source of power possible,” he says.
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