Teraco will invest R1 billion in the expansion of its data centre campus – in its largest infrastructure build project to date. Africa’s only neutral data centre provider has announced it will be expanding the Teraco Isando Campus (JB1). Increased demand for additional data centre capacity is being driven by cloud uptake and enterprise organisations wanting to access the Teraco platform.
The expansion will occur in two phases. Phase one, currently under way, will grow the facility by 2 000 cabinets, bringing the total JB1 Campus capacity to 5 700. Total usable floor space will increase by 4 000 square metres, expanding to a total of 12 000 square metres across the data centre campus. The anticipated ready for service date is in Q3 2019.
A total of 60MW of power will be reticulated to the site addressing requirements for further expansion after phase one has been completed. The total power available to the Isando Campus will now reach 80MW.
Jan Hnizdo, Chief Financial Officer, Teraco, says he sees continued demand for Teraco’s services given the unique business model and secular growth trends as the African continent continues to digitally transform. The Teraco campus expansion follows on from the recently launched Riverfields hyper-scale data centre facility in Bredell.
Hnizdo says funding for the build is via a combination of internally generated funds and enlarging existing debt facilities from R1.2 billion to R1.8 billion. “Our debt funding partner, Absa, continues to be highly supportive of our business model and is a key partner in Teraco’s growth strategy.”
Teraco’s platform allows direct interconnection
Teraco’s offering to clients of resilient data centre facilities allows for a choice of over 300 telcos providing connectivity to Africa and the lowest latency interconnection points to cloud and content. Hnizdo says with the recent announcements of direct interconnection availability to the major cloud on-ramps such as Amazon Web Services Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, Teraco has seen a growing uptake driven by the enterprise market.
“The Teraco platform allows enterprises to have direct private connections to all the leading cloud providers in the most latency efficient and resilient manner possible. Enterprises can deploy their public, private and hybrid cloud strategies from the Teraco platform, which allows for complete freedom of choice from a cloud provider perspective, as well as significantly reducing the time and cost for enterprises to access these cloud platforms.”
Over the past decade, Teraco has focused on growing its ecosystems of telco, content, financial services, enterprise and service providers. Its offering is underpinned by providing clients with direct access to Africa’s largest Internet exchange, NAPAfrica, which includes all the benefits of interconnection via the Teraco platform.
Hnizdo says Teraco is committed to growing its capacity footprint across its core hubs, thereby ensuring clients have certainty and the flexibility of expansion to take part in the digital transformation happening across sub-Saharan Africa: “Teraco continues to invest significantly into the region’s ICT infrastructure and has built what is now Africa’s largest data centre. We take pride in our vendor-neutral offering, with open access to interconnection and world-class resilient data centre infrastructure for all our clients.”
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Teraco
Teraco provides carrier and cloud neutral colocation data centres, and with over 14 500 cross-connects, is Africa’s most interconnected data centre hub. As the first provider of highly resilient, vendor neutral data environments in sub Saharan Africa, Teraco brings global content closer to the digital edge.
With its world class data centre infrastructure and network dense ecosystems, Teraco forms a vital part of the African Internet’s backbone and is an essential part of the modern enterprise’s digital transformation strategy. It’s ever expanding ecosystems move Teraco beyond colocation and firmly establish it as an open marketplace for digital growth and innovation. Discovering new business partners, making strategic interconnection choices, on-ramping to your choice of cloud, and reaching new markets globally – Teraco provides a highly secure, flexible and resilient home for digital organisations the world over.
Purpose-built and operated to global best practice by an expert organisation with an absolute focus on data centre technology and infrastructure, Teraco offers all its clients secure, cost effective, sustainable, scalable and resilient data centre services through its Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town facilities.
Teraco is backed by leading international investors Berkshire Partners LLC and Permira. Teraco is a Level 3 BBBEE contributor (DTI Codes).