MTN Business pumps up data centre

MTN Business has completed one of the largest live infrastructure enhancement projects in the Southern Hemisphere at its Gallo Manor data centre, as it aggressively expand its Managed Cloud services.

MTN Business this morning unveiled one of the largest live infrastructure enhancement projects in the Southern Hemisphere, following a comprehensive expansion and technology refresh of its Gallo Manor data centre in Johannesburg.

The capability of the Gallo Manor data centre has always been a key resource for MTN Business, with the hosting infrastructure being amongst the first for the South African market when initially launched over a decade ago. With the upgrade, the data centre will underpin MTN Business’s aggressive expansion of its cloud computing, virtualisation and convergence services.

‚This facility has been instrumental in driving our business model of excellence and will continue to do so into the future due to, amongst other things, its location, infrastructure magnitude and size,‚ says Angela Gahagan-Thomson, Managing Executive at MTN Business.

‚Of course, looking at technologies such as cloud computing, virtualisation and convergence, and the important role that these will continually play on the operational utilities of business today – a substantial upgrade investment into Gallo Manor was a key objective of ours in 2011, to ensure our customers can take full and immediate advantage of technology innovation. Therefore, given the critical nature of this data centre, we chose to undertake a complete live refresh.‚

The Gallo Manor expansion sees the total footprint size of the data centre reach 2000m2, with another 500m2 already earmarked for expansion, thus allowing for seamless growth for colocation customers. With 6 main data centres and 11 third-party hosting sites, Gallo Manor is geared towards becoming the flagship facility for hosting and Cloud Services for MTN Business.

‚This enhancement talks to MTN Business’ rapid expansion initiatives in support of our growing managed hosting product offerings,‚ adds Gahagan-Thomson. ‚We understood the need to provide a facility that is not simply viewed as a data centre, but rather a technological ‚launch pad’ for our value added services to ensure customers can scale their business technology innovation as necessary – all while benefiting from improved cost efficiencies, greener functionality and unsurpassed service and maintenance excellence.‚

To ensure that MTN Business delivers the highest power availability and uptime to customers an additional redundant diesel generator set has been installed, should the entire feeder grid fail for an extended period of time. Furthermore, all racks are being fed power from 2(N+1) UPS sets, with sufficient battery backup. As a result, the facility has been designed to meet the ever increasing power requirements of modern IT equipment, and provides customers with optimal power usage management functionality. Moreover, MTN Business is now able to have a more accurate view of high consumption and impact areas, which allows for more precise measurement and overall enhanced management of the facility.

Additional notable changes include, but are not limited to, the following:

Says Gahagan-Thomson: ‚Growth: corporate governance policies: as well as carbon reduction are becoming key aspects for businesses consideration today and smart organisations understand this. MTN Business continues to move with these changes to assist customers in reaching such goals within the telecommunications environment. This enhanced Gallo Manor facility will provide our enterprise customers with a fully Opex Pay-per use Model, 24/7 managed hosting environment with specific power and data usage efficiencies management capabilities and of course, all this backed by a highly acclaimed customer service excellence experience.‚

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