INTELLIGENT DATACENTRES
Teraco to invest in expansion of
data centre campus
eraco has announced it is to
invest R1 billion in the expansion
of its data centre campus in its
largest infrastructure build project to date.
Africa’s only neutral data centre provider
will be expanding the Teraco Isando Campus
(JB1). Increased demand for additional data
centre capacity is being driven by cloud
uptake and enterprise organisations wanting
to access the Teraco platform.
The expansion will occur in two phases.
Phase 1, currently underway, will grow the
facility by 2,000 cabinets bringing the total
JB1 Campus capacity to 5,700.
Total usable floor space will increase by
4,000 square metres, expanding to a total of
T
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
Issue 23
12,000 square metres across the data centre
campus. The anticipated ready for service
date is in Q3 2019.
A total of 60MW of power will
be reticulated to the site addressing
requirements for further expansion after
Phase 1 has been completed. The total power
available to the Isando Campus will now
reach 80MW.
Jan Hnizdo, Chief Financial Officer,
Teraco, says that he sees continued demand
for Teraco’s services given the unique
business model and secular growth trends
as the African continent continues to
digitally transform.
The Teraco Campus expansion follows
on from the recently launched Riverfields
hyper-scale data centre facility in Bredell.
Hnizdo said that funding for the build is
via a combination of internally generated
funds and enlarging existing debt facilities
from R1.2 billion to R1.8 billion, adding: “Our
debt funding partners, Absa, continue to be
highly supportive of our business model and
are key partners in Teraco’s growth strategy.”
Teraco’s platform allows direct
interconnection
Teraco’s offering to clients of resilient data
centre facilities allows for a choice of over
300 telcos providing connectivity to Africa
and the lowest latency interconnection
points to cloud and content.
Hnizdo says that with the recent
announcements of direct interconnection
availability to the major cloud onramps such
as Amazon Web Services Direct Connect
and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, Teraco
has seen a growing uptake driven by the
enterprise market.
“The Teraco platform allows enterprises
to have direct private connections to all the
leading cloud providers in the most latency
efficient and resilient manner possible.
“Enterprises can deploy their public,
private and hybrid cloud strategies from the
Teraco platform 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.”
Over the past decade, Teraco has focused
on growing its ecosystems of telco, content,
financial services, enterprise and service
providers. Its offering is underpinned
by providing clients with direct access
to Africa’s largest Internet exchange,
NAPAfrica, which includes all the benefits of
interconnection via the Teraco platform.
Hnizdo says that Teraco is committed
to growing its capacity footprint across
its core hubs, thereby ensuring that
clients have certainty and the flexibility
of expansion to take part in the Digital
Transformation that is happening across
sub-Saharan Africa.
43