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Vox outsources data centre management to Teraco

Kgaogelo Letsebe
By Kgaogelo Letsebe, Portals journalist
Johannesburg, 16 Aug 2018
Vox Telecom has migrated its non-core activity, such as data centre facilities management, to Terraco's Riverfields Hyperscale facility in Bredel.
Vox Telecom has migrated its non-core activity, such as data centre facilities management, to Terraco's Riverfields Hyperscale facility in Bredel.

Local ICT and telecoms company, Vox Telecom will shut down its Waverley data centre by November 2018. The company will outsource its data centre facilities management to Teraco's Riverfields Hyperscale facility, one of Africa's largest data centres.

Keith Laaks, executive head for core at Vox, says the site's logistical constraints was the main reason behind the decision. "Site logistics constraints do not allow us to expand our Waverley data centre facility any further. With the data centre filling up fast, we took the decision to move the data centre, and through 2017, evaluated many data centre facilities operating within the Gauteng area."

He adds that Teraco's Riverfields site meets all its technical and location requirements. "By fate or fortune, the data centre was completed and became operational in just the right timeframe and came at the right cost point. It also allows us and our customers to immediately benefit from the latest, state-of-the-art technologies and systems that ensure a stable and secure environment."

Vox already uses Teraco data centre facilities in Isando, Riverfields, Durban and Cape Town and says the move to the Riverfields facility in Kempton Park forms part of its strategy for geo-redundant services for carrier, voice and cloud customers.

"In addition to this site having become another node on our network from which to deliver our full range of connectivity services, it is also now operational with the complete range of compute and storage platforms we use to deliver our virtual hosting (virtual machines and virtual data centres), Web hosting, co-location hosting and backup services, with hundreds of customers already migrated across from our Waverley site."

Laaks adds that the provisioning of its routing, switching, compute, storage and associated redundant fibre infrastructure has been completed, with the co-location and cloud services now in full production.

"Our NetApp and Dell/EMC storage platforms support the replication, in real-time, of data between our Isando and Riverfields data centres. This geo-redundant storage, combined with our VMWare virtualisation and compute environment on both sites, is used both internally and by our customers to support mission-critical workloads, where operational requirements demand that downtime due to a disaster event or equipment failure must be kept to a minimum - typically minutes rather than hours while a backup is being restored."

The Riverfields data centre is the fourth carrier-, cloud- and vendor-neutral facility to be built by Teraco. Earlier this year, the local data centre provider invested R1 billion in expanding its Isando Campus in Gauteng, to create Africa's largest mega data centre, which will be four times bigger than the Teraco Riverfields Campus.

With regards to using more Teraco data facilities in future, Laaks says the option is there. "Should Teraco expand and add more sites, we will obviously assess each on a case-by-case basis."

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