Vendor-neutral data centre solutions provider Teraco has confirmed the construction of Teraco Cape Town 2 (CT2), a new 30MW data centre facility.
This follows the company’s recent 60MW expansion announcement of its Johannesburg data centre campus in Isando and makes the Cape Town facility the second largest on the continent.
Teraco provides carrier and cloud-neutral co-location data centres, and with over 14 500 cross-connects, is Africa’s most interconnected data centre hub.
In July last year, the company said it will invest R1 billion in the expansion of its Isando data centre campus – in its largest infrastructure build project to date.
However, the company did not disclose how much it invested in the new facility.
The move to build a data centre in Cape Town comes as multinational cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have launched data centre regions in SA.
It is expected these data centre investments by AWS and Microsoft will accelerate cloud adoption in SA.
With these data centres now sitting in SA, organisations with data residency requirements, and those looking to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act, can now store their content within South African borders.
Currently, AWS Direct Connect, Microsoft Express Route and Google's Cloud Platform are all available via Treraco's cloud exchange.
Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco, says the company is standing by its 2019 commitment to support the South African government’s investment drive and with this build will be investing billions of rands in South Africa’s digital infrastructure.
“We are truly proud that we can keep investing in the region and make good on our promise.”
Driving this investment, according to Hnizdo, is the growth of cloud in the region, resulting in increased demand from cloud providers, enterprises and sub-sea cable operators seeking to locate their data centre infrastructure at the intersection of the Internet.
“Proximity to the cloud, ecosystems and the consumer market is vital in new digital architecture as enterprises move their applications into the cloud and transform their businesses,” says Hnizdo.
Construction on the site commenced in early March and will continue in line with local COVID-19 restrictions with a targeted completion date of Q3 2021, the company says.
It adds the completed facility will comprise of eight data halls encompassing 8 000sqm of usable floor space, doubling the existing data centre capacity in the Cape Town region.
Hnizdo says Teraco launched its first data centre facility located in Rondebosch, Cape Town, CT1, 11 years ago.
“This new investment in the Mother City is special for us. To date, CT1 has seen four expansions since launching; the historic building currently has sufficient capacity until the new site is brought to market.”
The company says its offering to enterprises, of resilient data centre facilities, allows for a choice of over 250 networks 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 onramps such as Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute and AWS Direct Connect, Teraco has seen a growing uptake driven by the enterprise market.
“Platform Teraco allows enterprises to have direct private connections to all the leading cloud providers in the most latency efficient, secure and resilient manner possible,” Hnizdo says.
“Enterprises can deploy their public, private and hybrid cloud strategies on Platform Teraco, 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.”
Teraco says over the past decade, it has focused on growing its ecosystems of carriers, content, financial services, enterprise and service providers.It says its offering is underpinned by providing clients with direct access to Africa’s largest Internet Exchange Point, NAPAfrica, which includes all the benefits of interconnection via the Teraco platform. By deploying NAPAfrica within the new CT2 facility, Teraco expects to see further growth and benefit for the enterprise and content ecosystems in the region.
Hnizdo reaffirms that 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 that is 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 platform. 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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