365 days to build Africa’s first hyperscale data centre
The end of 2017 marks the completion of Africa’s first hyperscale data centre, JB2-Bredell. Owned and operated by Africa’s largest and only vendor neutral data centre, Teraco, the Bredell Hyperscale Data Centre Facility located in Bredell features over 24 MW of power and 6000m² of technical deployment space and is the largest commercial data centre in operation in Africa. The record-breaking build brings with it much anticipation as the continent sees more and more technology giants choosing to colocate to Africa.
Gys Geyser, Head of Infrastructure Development, Teraco says that the build has not only been the first of its kind, but done in record time: “This is another Teraco first as we broke the mould of traditional brick and mortar buildings, and opted for a warehouse-type build instead.”
He says that Teraco designed the facility incorporating different elements of tiering solutions and industry best practices to ensure concurrent maintainability, with added enhancements to cover different levels of fault tolerance. “We were able to double the power and cooling capacity, using similar mission critical footprints gained from previous deployments.”
Bredell is the fourth facility built by Teraco, who also has locations in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg (Isando). Current power provision totals 50MW with over 18 000m2 of white space.
“Bredell is another incredible achievement and we are excited to welcome our first tenant this month, and look forward to watching Bredell play an important role in the development of Africa’s internet economy.”
About Teraco
Founded in 2008, Teraco Data Environments is the first provider of resilient, carrier, cloud and vendor neutral data environments in South Africa. It is also the biggest data centre in Africa. Clients benefit from the cost savings and improved resilience of securely housing their information systems and networking equipment in a colocation facility purpose-built and operated to global best practice by an expert organisation with an absolute focus on data centre technology and infrastructure. Teraco is also home to Africa’s largest Internet eXchange Point (IXP) NAPAfrica. It is one of the top 20 largest global IXPs by membership. Since its launch in 2012, it has grown to over 140 GBPS of traffic and 200 members, and is now a critical component of Africa’s Internet eco-system.
