From operating in a basement in Cape Town in 2008, Teraco is planning to aggressively expand its data centre footprint in South Africa and the rest of the African continent.
This was revealed by Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco, in an interview with ITWeb after the vendor-neutral data centre and interconnection platform provider yesterday announced the completion of the first phase of JB4, its new hyperscale data centre addition to the Bredell Campus, Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg.
The JB4 addition to Teraco’s growing data centre platform takes critical power load capacity at Teraco facilities to 126MW, which includes the Isando Campus JB1/JB3 (40MW), Bredell Campus JB2/JB4 (64MW), Cape Town Campus CT1/CT2 (21MW) and Durban (1MW).
“We will very shortly be announcing new expansion plans for South Africa, specifically around our existing campuses,” Hnizdo says. “With regards to the African continent, there is also an expansion strategy under way.”
In August, US-based Digital Realty completed the acquisition of Teraco, which has since grown to become Africa’s largest data centre provider, with 126MW of critical power load across seven facilities.
With the backing of Digital Realty, Hnizdo says Teraco will continue to expand its data centre footprint.
“Digital Realty has made investments in leading players in the region, namely iColo.io based in Kenya and Mozambique, and Medallion Communications based in Nigeria. The expansion strategy is to back the local management teams to continue to build their businesses under the Digital Realty umbrella in their respective regions,” he says.
Rapid escalation
Commenting on how the acquisition has impacted operations, he adds: “We very much continue to operate as we have in the past. Digital Realty’s approach is to partner with local management teams that have been successful in growing and running their business, and the same approach has been taken with Teraco.
“Additionally, we are now part of a global knowledge base that we will be able to leverage and benefit from.”
He notes the acquisition has impacted Teraco in positive ways. “Digital Realty has bought into Teraco’s business plan, which incorporates significant new builds over the next five years.
“We have always had local supportive institutional funders of Teraco who, now with the backing of Digital Realty, are keen to continue to grow their exposure to Teraco as the company continues to grow.”
The last 14 years have been a whirlwind journey for Teraco, Hnizdo says. “From humble beginnings in 2008 with 500kw of shared infrastructure operating from a basement in Cape Town, we are now Africa’s largest data centre provider.
“We started off very much servicing the telecommunications and content providers; but over the last few years, we have also focused on the enterprise space (financial services, retailers, manufacturing, mining and e-commerce) where there is a growing demand for ecosystem-rich world-class data centre facilities from which enterprises can deploy their digital transformation strategies.”
Teraco is not the only company building data centres in the country. And this growth of physical facilities is spurred on by the demands of hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle, which are looking for space to occupy with their own data centre infrastructure.
According to a recent report by DLA Piper, South Africa currently has over 50 active data centre locations, with the number growing by the day.
This, as the demand for data centre access on the African continent, and specifically South Africa, has grown exponentially over the past few years.
Commenting on the arrival of other hyperscalers, Hnizdo says: “We very much have a partnership-based relationship with hyperscale cloud providers.
“Our facilities serve as their cloud onramp platforms (where their customers access the cloud, which is different to where the server farms are located), given our extensive ecosystem of over 280 carriers, 160 managed service providers and content, enterprise and financial services customers. By enabling enterprise and carriers to interconnect directly onto cloud-onramps, connections with cloud providers become more cost-effective and more secure.”
Alternative mix
Hnizdo points out that SA has seen a great deal of growth in the data centre space in the last five years.
There are several drivers for this growth, he explains. “Many enterprises are coming to the realisation that it makes better financial and operational sense to collocate in vendor-neutral facilities, as it provides a more cost-effective, secure and robust alternative to them than building their own server rooms and data centres.”
Additionally, he notes, enterprises are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy using a mixture of public and private cloud.
“The private cloud needs to be paced in highly-available and connected facility; and, as a result, enterprises are migrating from own facilities to a mixture of using public cloud and private cloud, which is in turn placed in facilities like Teraco.
“The public cloud providers see South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa as a growing market. The region can’t be serviced effectively from Europe and the US due to latency. Thus, in order to service their clients, public cloud providers are building out their data centres in South Africa, not only to serve South Africa but also the Sub-Saharan region more broadly.”
Hnizdo states the new undersea cables, such as METISS, ACE, Equiano and 2Africa, are all very positive for SA and Teraco.
“The cable operators and their telco partners operate their deployment nodes out of Teraco, which in turn services the ecosystem of carriers and enterprises collocated in our facilities,” he concludes.
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