Denis Opudo
JB2-Bredell is the largest data center in Africa. The data center has been completed after 365 days of construction making it Africa’s first hyper-scale data center bringing more investments from technology giants. The Bredell Hyperscale Data Centre Facility located in Bredell has more than 24 MW of power, and 6000m² of technical working space is owned and operated by Teraco, the only neutral data center vendor in Africa.
According to Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk, the demand is pushed by big data and cloud computing, as well as enterprise organizations that consume these services locally, Many of these, have not been available locally or are only in few functionality due to restrictions presented by high latencies due to distance.
This will be the fourth facility built by Teraco, though the company had earlier promised that the center would be complete by 1st November also has locations in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg (Isando). Current power provision totals 50MW with exceed 18 000m2 of white space. Teraco designed the facility incorporating different elements of tiring solutions and industry best practices to ensure concurrent maintainability, with added enhancements to cover different levels of fault tolerance. According to Gys Geyser, the Head of Infrastructure Development, they are able to double the power and cooling capacity, using similar mission-critical footprints gained from previous deployments.
Internationally, researchers predict the global co-location market will grow to more than $50 billion by 2020, a CAGR of over 12% from 2015 to 2020. A significant portion of this demand is being driven by the enterprise, IT and telecommunications sectors. Scale data center market was said to be over $1 billion in mid-2015.
