SA’s Teraco Wants to Enable Africa’s Connected Society

We live in a world where five billion people are connected and where mobile, broadband, and cloud are transforming the fabric of society.

Ericsson in a new report titled: An Economic Study of the Hyperscale Data Centre, calls this world the Networked Society and it is impacting our everyday lives in profound ways, not unlike the titanic shifts of the industrial revolution more than a century ago.

Ericsson added that with the rise of the Internet of Things, more products are becoming “smart” and connected with other things across an expanding global cloud network. Meanwhile, information streams from these networks are proliferating, spawning opportunities to harness Big Data for competitive advantage as well as social progress.

Meanwhile, information streams from these networks are proliferating, spawning opportunities to harness Big Data for competitive advantage as well as social progress.

The report shows that to thrive in the Networked Society, businesses will need to seize fast-emerging digital business opportunities that require immediate deployments of compute, storage, and networking resources. “This means data centres will need to provide business stakeholders with the same “infrastructure on tap” capabilities that modern cloud-service providers like Amazon Web Services have pioneered,” said the company.

The great majority of enterprise data centres today are ill-equipped to help businesses succeed in the Networked Society. Designed primarily to deliver back-office applications to internal business users, the traditional data centre is burdened with an inefficient and costly architectural design that prevents it from scaling and flexing rapidly to meet the changing workloads of a modern digital enterprise.

To address these inefficiencies, the traditional data centre is evolving.

Technology giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook were among the first to exploit the new architectural paradigm, developing what is called hyperscale data centres—highly scalable platforms built to handle the massively complex workloads of the Networked Society.

South Africa’s Teraco is building a gigantic new hyperscale data centre facility in Bredell, Kempton Park, to join the network society.

As part of the expansion to Bredell, Teraco will also be extending NAPAfrica, Africa’s largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) to ensure that all its clients are able to benefit from the peering exchange and all the technology within existing Teraco data centres.

Africa’s largest colocation data centre provider is building the new data centre to meet the demands of IoT, online content, storage requirements and cloud computing.

Featuring over 24 MW of power and 6000m² of technical deployment space, Riverfields is the largest commercial data centre operator in Africa.

Lex van Wyk, CEO, Teraco says hyperscale computing has grown enormously, as has demand for colocation facilities. “These trends combined are shaping the way forward for Africa and we anticipate significant uptake as more service providers pinpoint Africa as a growth market.”

Internationally, researchers predict that the global colocation 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.

The hyperscale data centre market was estimated at over $1 billion in mid-2015 with significant growth forecast based on storage resource demands in distributed or grid computing environments.

Teraco has witnessed this growth first-hand across its data centre businesses as well as the uptake within NAPAfrica, the largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Africa, which is located within Teraco’s data centre facilities.

Van Wyk says hyperscale computing is another in a long line of technology trends that will profoundly shape enterprise computing.

“We will see new sectors emerge and a consolidation of IT resources that will lead to a small, but powerful group of players, bringing what the industry now knows to by hyperscale computing.”

The Riverfields facility in Bredell brings our power provision to 50MW with over 18 000m2 of white space. All of which is required to meet the increasing demand for hyperscale computing.

Van Wyk says Teraco is excited about the evolution of this technology, but remain fully committed to building Africa’s neutral colocation infrastructure and helping to shape the African market.

It’s taken hyperscale computing a decade to steadily claim significant cloud infrastructure service market share.

Initially focused on major international markets, Africa has not been a priority until recently, when large players started turning their attention to Africa. Since then, the continent has seen top operators, content creators and cloud providers committing to significant infrastructure investment.

In doing this, these service providers are finally offering local businesses an opportunity to retain data locally. In just under two years, African companies have started to fast-track the adoption of cloud and as a result, are aggressively pursuing opportunities to migrate.

Evidence of this investment was visible today as Teraco, Africa’s largest, neutral data centre, launched its Riverfields Hyperscale Centre east of Johannesburg.

These pioneering hyperscale platforms have set the modern standard for performance, efficiency, and manageability, according to Ericsson.

In fact, Ericsson said research found that these custom-built hyperscale data centres, when compared to traditional data centres, deliver four times the level of CPU utilization, increase network utilization by as much as 26%, and dramatically lift productivity by enabling a single IT administrator to manage thousands of servers versus just hundreds, as shown in Figure 2.

“These efficiencies have enabled large public cloud providers to drive down data centre infrastructure and management costs, making it economically feasible to accommodate the massive computing and storage demands of the Networked Society,” concludes Ericsson.

“The next step in the evolution of the data centre is to make hyperscale cloud architectures commercially available to enterprises worldwide.”