Cloud storm from Vodacom

Vodacom today opened a state-of-the-art, energy efficient data centre in Cape Town Foreshore, aimed at saving R1-million a year in energy costs.

‚As part of the journey to reduce our carbon footprint, one of the key design goals when building this data centre was to ensure energy efficiency which will not only help reduce carbon emissions, but can result in cost reductions that can be passed on to our customers,” says Portia Maurice, Chief Officer of Corporate Affairs at Vodacom.

“”We’re excited about this data centre because it shows our commitment to our joint initiative with our parent company Vodafone, to ensure that we reduce our carbon emissions worldwide.‚

The data centre was built to meet the needs of the growing community of Vodacom business customers and to prepare for the expansion of cloud computing.

‚Since the establishment of our Business Services division just over three years ago, we are seeing business customers of all sizes demand more and more services to run and grow their organisations,‚ says Chris Ross, Managing Executive Commercial, Vodacom Group.

‚Virtualisation, hosted services such as hosted call centres, telepresence, and increased acceptance of convergence have all been major factors in the investment in our new data centres. Vodacom has now established itself as a leading cloud based hosting provider in South Africa and is aggressively expanding its capabilities across the continent.

“”The infrastructure reaches through all of its data centres and as such enables customers to deploy rapidly in any geographic region ‚ bringing the Foreshore data centre online is an integral link in those capabilities,‚ says Ross.

Scalable cloud computing plays a vital role in any modern data centre and Vodacom has partnered with VMware and Novell to give customers all the benefits of efficient and cost effective market-leading technology.

‚Vodacom has reduced the space needed to host traditional servers in our data centre. We have also reduced power utilization to help reduce our carbon foot print. We will pass the benefits of cloud computing to our customers and enabling a truly flexible, agile and scalable cloud service,‚ concluded Ross.

Some facts on the data centre:

* “