(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A year after its Cape Town facility went live, South African vendor-neutral data center provider Teraco Data Environments (www.teraco.co.za) has opened its second vendor neutral data center, located in Isando, Johannesburg.
According to its Tuesday announcement, the new Johannesburg center was originally scheduled to open end February 2010 but was brought forward to meet customer demand for a vendor neutral facility that provides real flexibility and choice. Clients had already started commissioning equipment within the data center last week, and the company anticipates that Teraco Johannesburg will become a central node to several of the new national telecoms networks that are currently being rolled out as competition within the country’s telecom market grows.
“Our customers are fast tracking their networks to get to market,” Teraco managing director Lex van Wyk said in a statement. “They depend on Teraco to provide the location, so we worked with our contractors to be able to deliver the project ahead of schedule.”
The location of the new data center places it amongst the fiber rings of most of the major licensed carriers in South Africa, including Telkom, Neotel, Vodacom and Dark Fibre Africa.
The facility’s power is on, acceptance tests on the UPS and generators are complete. The cooling and fire suppression systems are operational and are in final testing. Contractors are now focusing on finishing external work, office areas and staff facilities.
The data center has also been secured with monitoring systems installed and undergoing final commissioning. Telkom is currently installing its node and will be commissioning it next week. Carrier connectivity from several fiber network providers is now available.
In November 2008, South Africa took a more liberal stance in its telecom industry regulation, allowing companies to self-provision their data for the first time ever in South Africa, giving carriers, corporations, ISPs and IT service providers unrestricted control over their data. Teraco and other outsourced data center companies hope to take over much of the business that used to be largely the domain of ISPs and large IT outsourcing companies, or bundled with Internet access plans or managed hosting services.
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