Africa Data Centres, part of pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom, has expanded its Midrand-based data centre to a 7 MW, 3 000 m² carrier-neutral facility to better serve demand for cloud and co-location services in Southern Africa, says Liquid Telecom group CTO Ben Roberts.

It has also upgraded its Cape Town data centre to 1 800 m² and 5.5 MW of power. The company has a 2 000 m² East Africa Data Centre, in Nairobi, Kenya.

The expansion of the South Africa-based data centres, which are part of information and communication technology company Neotel’s acquisition by Liquid Telecom, is the first phase planned across the company’s Africa data centres.

Further stages of expansion are planned for data centres in Midrand, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, as Africa Data Centres aims to increase space at the facilities fivefold over the next five years, he says.

The Midrand and Cape Town facilities host Internet exchanges operated independently by INX-ZA. Through a partnership with INX-ZA, the Johannesburg Internet Exchange has been expanded, and the Cape Town Internet Exchange has been extended to the Cape Town data centre, enabling connected members in any site to peer quickly and cost effectively with members in other data centres.

“As cloud-based solutions become more common, businesses across Africa require more carrier-neutral, open-access data centre space for their business-critical data and applications,” says Liquid Telecom group CEO Nic Rudnick.

The data centres are interconnected by multiple networks, including Liquid Telecom’s own fibre network, which provides regional and international reach for customers.

“This allows businesses hosting data and cloud in Africa to have control and flexibility of where to host and back up their data with geographic diversity,” says Roberts.

The company’s South Africa data centres service about 100 customers, including global, regional and local telecommunications operators, Internet service providers, cloud service providers and large enterprises.

“Customers at Liquid Telecom’s Africa Data Centres can also access our CloudConnect for Microsoft ExpressRoute service, which enables businesses to create private connections between Azure data centres and infrastructure on-premises or in a colocation environment,” he says.

“In the first half of 2018, Liquid Telecom will be able to offer direct private connections to the South African Azure data centres – marking the first time that businesses in Africa will be able to access Azure on their own continent,” Roberts explains.

The company is expanding its East Africa data centre, which is currently the only data centre in East Africa with Tier III certification.

The data centres are International Standards Organisation 27001-certified, and comply with high international information security management standards. The data centre facilities are also Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard-compliant, which is the global information security standard to control and reduce points of risk to fraud or compromise of sensitive information, concludes Rudnick.