Business Connexion (BCX) has broken ground for the construction of a high-availability data centre in Midrand. The company hopes the centre will attract the offshore market through competitive pricing and new technology and design.
Mike Sewell, managing executive of managed services at BCX, says BCX is serious about outsourcing in the data centre market. The facility "should send a shiver down the spine of competitors like IBM, T-Systems, and Arivia," he says.
Sewell claims the company will use the centre to put SA on the map in terms of outsourcing to the offshore market.
CEO Peter Watt says BCX has based the data centre construction on best practices guidelines set by the Uptime Institute, Gartner, the SA Bureau of Standards, the British Standards Institute and the International Standards Organisation.
Sewell says the company will use the latest thinking and technology in the facility, allowing it to offer cost-effective services thanks to lower real estate and labour costs locally.
He claims BCX will be able to guarantee clients they will not experience downtimes of more than 24 minutes a year.
Although conceding that data communication costs could be a negative factor, Sewell believes this will be resolved soon. "The government cannot allow SA to remain uncompetitive," he comments.
Everything that supplies the new data centre will be duplicated, such as electrical power, cooling systems, uninterruptible power systems and diesel generators.
Sewell explains that the data centre will be `twinned` in the furthest corner of the same office park to ensure maximum protection and redundancy.
"Connected by `dark fibre` ultra-high-speed cables running in two independent routes, the second site is identical."
Construction of the data centre is scheduled to be complete in June 2006 and the centre is due to open for business by the end of October 2006.
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