Vodacom Business opened its third, energy-efficient data centre in Midrand yesterday.
The 3 000 square metre facility has been built in line with the company's green philosophy and designed to have a minimal impact on the environment. The new facility adds a significant amount of additional hosting capacity and will help Vodacom Business deliver on its new cloud strategy as South African businesses increasingly look to move from traditional on-site hosting to a shared data centre environment enabled by cloud or hosted services.
Speaking at the data centre opening, Ermano Quartero, managing executive at Vodacom Business, said the fundamental philosophy for Vodacom is to be green aware and green enabled in all it does. The data centre has been built to use minimal water, minimal heat, recyclable material, self-generation. "So our effort has been to do our best to be as green as possible when we consume," he said.
"This data centre takes energy off the grid by hosting servers in our data centres. We think this could save a small city the equivalent energy it takes to power a city like Pretoria. That's how we can save the country, just by moving computers off company premises into the data centres, because they consume less and therefore what is consumed is a lot greener."
To Quartero, companies that run their own computers have a lot of air conditioners so they consume more power. "Their rooms are inefficient and that takes more cooling - so for them to cool one unit of space it takes three times more cooling than what we would do in an efficient data centre," he said.
In addition, moving the data centre to the cloud can also reduce a company's carbon footprint, particularly when the cloud service provider has strong green credentials. While there is no formal "green" benchmark rating in place for data centres, Vodacom follows the guidelines set out by the Green Building Council of South Africa. The company's latest data centre incorporates a series of green innovations designed to reduce electricity consumption.
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