SA's second network operator, Neotel, will extend its services into the data centre space, and will make an initial R100 million investment in two new data centres, which will be commercially active by next month.
Neotel's executive head of the enterprise group, Stefano Mattiello, says the two centres will be located in Midrand and Cape Town. They will be capable of passing through Terabits of information, with a later possibility of far higher speeds, he adds.
He says alongside the new data centres, Neotel will launch two new services that will bolster a commercial data hosting offering. While Mattiello will not reveal the actual solutions, he hints Cisco and Dimension Data would be involved in the first solution and content would be the next step.
Mattiello notes there could be a possibility of streaming services like YouTube from locally hosted content - leading to the possibility that Neotel could compete directly with local Google content.
Neotel initially announced its data centre initiative in October last year, saying it would seek an aggressive entry into the space of managed services.
“We've earned our stripes in the infrastructure game; now the market is ready for us, giving us huge business; and we can deliver. So our strategy, to deploy fibre only, is paying off,” Mattiello said in an earlier interview.
With its entry into the managed services space with its data centres, the company is taking a different approach. Mattiello explains that, in keeping with the tradition of being first-to-market, the telecoms operator will be the first company in the country to deploy a fully-fledged telepresence facility.
“We will also be the first in the country to delivery a content-delivery node, as part of a global CDN [content delivery network]. So, for the first time, we're actually bringing the Internet to South Africa, from a content point of view.”
So, for the first time, we're actually bringing the Internet to South Africa, from a content point of view.
Stefano Mattiello, executive head of enterprise group, Neotel
In addition, says Mattiello, the data centre will naturally offer traditional services, such as co-location, managed customer-premises equipment, storage-on-demand and virtualisation, but, ultimately, it is about “going to the next level”.
To achieve this, Neotel will leverage its relationship with Tata Communications, part of the India-based Tata Group, which holds a stake in the South African telecoms operator.
“These guys have over a million square feet of data centres around the world. They know what a data centre is all about and they understand what needs to be done. They will be building an additional 1 000 telepresence centres around the world in the next 12 months and they also drive one of the biggest content delivery networks in the world.”
Tata Communications now sees SA as a home market and Mattiello says the company would easily make the kind of investments here as it normally would in other markets, such as India or the US.
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