Nigeria is about to get a boost in its data centre capacity with the announcement by Rack Centre, a leading carrier-neutral data centre operator in West Africa, that it will increase capacity to 6000 square metres and allow for 13MW of IT power capacity in its Lagos campus.
This will be in addition to current expansion underway to double existing capacity to 1.5MW and 1,200 square metres of white space in early 2021. Rackspace says the expansion will bring unprecedented carrier-neutral scale to West Africa. It is in response to increasing demand for data centre space from cloud uptake, telecommunication investment and outsourcing of IT facilities by enterprises in the region.
In March
2020, Actis, a London private equity firm, announced an investment in
Rack Centre, taking a controlling stake in the business alongside
Jagal. The funding for this expansion will come from
a $250m pan-African data centre platform established by Actis and
Convergence Partners, a leading ICT infrastructure investor in Africa. In
addition to Rack Centre, the platform is also actively
developing additional buy and build opportunities across Africa, to
establish a network of carrier neutral data centres aimed at catering to
carrier, cloud and hyperscale customers.
Tim
Parsonson, co-founder of Teraco Data Environments, the largest carrier
neutral operator in Africa, joins the board as chairperson. The platform
has also engaged Frank Hassett, a veteran of the
global data centre industry and previous vice president of
Infrastructure at Equinix, who brings over 1300MW of build and operate
experience, to assist with hyperscale expansion.
“Africa is
at the start of a critical time in its development, as the
4th industrial revolution offers the chance to leapfrog many of Africa’s
challenges and harness the immense potential of its
people,” says Andile Ngcaba, chairman of Convergence Partners, which is partnering
with Actis in accelerating the growth of high quality data centre infrastructure.
With
138-million Internet users, more than any country in Africa or Europe,
and the largest population and GDP in Africa, Nigeria is a key entry
point for global telecommunications, content and cloud
players seeking access to the region. However, a lack
of cost effective, energy efficient IT infrastructure has been a
constraint to doing business in the region. Rack Centre brings global
best practice to Nigeria, as the first carrier neutral data centre in
the region to achieve Uptime Institute Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility (TCCF). As
a uniquely scale carrier neutral player, Rack Centre allows unrestricted
connectivity between customers, telecommunication carriers and internet
exchange points within its data centres.
“We are
proud of the quality and scale bar we have set in the region and are
scaling to be the de-facto digital data hub for West Africa”, says Dr
Ayotunde Coker, managing director of Rack Centre,
“Mass adoption of digital working models and content distribution is
driving growing investment in the region and Rack Centre offers a world
class location to house these IT and telecoms facilities”
Supporting
this ambition, engineering consultancy Arup have been appointed for the
project. Arup’s multidisciplinary data centre design teams are world
leaders in the design and construction of
data centres, having designed over 2,000MW of IT capacity for industry
leading tech giants and co-location providers across the globe.
Sustainability and Energy Savings
Data centres are energy intensive. With the data demands ever increasing, the design of Rack Centre’s Phase 2 facility will target regional industry leading Power Utilisation Efficiency (PUE) benchmarks, and will contribute towards [Sustainable Development Goals] in particular Affordable and Clean Energy, Industry Innovation and Infrastructure and Climate Action. Rack Centre is working on various green data centre initiatives to set other benchmarks in the Africa data centre landscape.
