Hyperscale demand encourages African infrastructure investment
It’s taken hyperscale computing a decade to steadily claim significant cloud infrastructure service market share. Initially focused on major international markets, Africa has not been a priority until recently – large players have started turning their attention to the continent. Since then, Africa has seen top operators, content creators, and cloud providers committing to significant infrastructure investment.
In doing this, these service providers are finally offering local businesses an opportunity to retain data locally. In just under two years, African companies have started to fast-track the adoption of cloud. As a result, they are aggressively pursuing opportunities to migrate. Evidence of this investment was visible today as Teraco, Africa’s largest, neutral data centre, opened its Riverfields hyperscale data centre east of Johannesburg. Featuring over 24MW of power and 6000m² of technical deployment space, Riverfields is the largest commercial data centre operator in Africa.
Lex van Wyk, CEO at Teraco, says the company designs and builds according to demand: “Hyperscale computing has grown enormously, as has demand for colocation facilities. Combined, these trends are shaping the way forward for Africa. We anticipate significant uptake as more service providers pinpoint Africa as a growth market.”
Riverfields hyperscale facility
Teraco completed its Jo’burg West build in Isando earlier this year. It is opening the Riverfields hyperscale data centre facility in response to the growing demand for such facilities in sub-Saharan Africa. “The demand is driven by big data and cloud computing, and enterprise organisations that consume these services locally. Many of these facilities have not been available locally, or are only in limited functionality, due to restrictions presented by high latencies due to distance.”
Internationally, researchers predict that the global colocation market will grow to more than US$50 billion by 2020, a CAGR of over 12% from 2015 to 2020. A significant portion of this demand is being driven by the enterprise, IT and telecommunications sectors. The hyperscale data centre market was estimated at over US$1 billion in mid-2015, with significant growth forecast based on storage resource demands in distributed or grid computing environments.
Teraco has witnessed this growth first-hand across its data centre businesses, as well as the uptake within NAPAfrica, the largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Africa, which is located within Teraco’s data centre facilities.
Hyperscale computing
Van Wyk says hyperscale computing is another in a long line of technology trends that will profoundly shape enterprise computing. “We will see new sectors emerge and a consolidation of IT resources that will lead to a small, but powerful group of players, bringing what the industry now knows to by hyperscale computing.”
Riverfields is the fourth facility built by Teraco, with locations in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. “The Riverfields facility in Bredell brings our power provision to 50MW with over 18 000 square metres of white space, all of which is required to meet the increasing demand for hyperscale computing,” explains Van Wyk. He says Teraco is excited about the evolution of this technology, but remains fully committed to building Africa’s neutral colocation infrastructure and helping to shape the African market.
