With IS move, data comes in from the cold

Data centres traditionally lie on the outskirts of cities, where wide-open spaces and cheap land make these sprawling computerstorage facilities more viable. The irony is that the clients of these services have most of their operations located in the heart of the city.

This was the impulse for Internet Solutions (IS), SA’s oldest internet service provider, to relocate its main data centre from The Campus in suburban Bryanston to a building in bustling Rosebank, one of Johannesburg’s main business districts.

The building is directly next door to IS’s old headquarters at 158 Jan Smuts Avenue, where a large sign once told passing traffic: “The internet starts here.” Back then, it was almost true, as the pioneering company was one of the first to build a data centre.

Nowadays, the local internet begins at more than 70 South African data centres operated by providers both large and small, offering data storage, computer processing and interconnection between numerous telecoms operators and services.

“We are standing in the hub of commerce on the African continent, between Sandton and Rosebank,” said Tony Walt, chief solutions and operations officer at IS, during a preview of the new facility. “Standing in the middle of a data centre in the densest space in the city is unique, because traditional centres are out in the sticks with massive space and open land.”

There is a significant benefit to finding the right space and creating the right configuration to make the concept work in an environment where real estate comes at a premium.

“The demand for emerging technologies like the Internet of Things and fog computing — cloud functionality at the edge of the network — requires certain transactions that don’t have to traverse to the cloud, and overcome latency. Especially for microtransactional computing in the financial services industry, latency is what it’s all about.

“For that you have to process computing and transactions as close to the edge as possible. We decided to adapt a building we owned for the advantage of our clients, and not just for ourselves,” said Walt.

Matthew Ashe, executive head of data centres at IS, said it was a bittersweet day: “The old building is where IS started. We just retired our internal data centre in that building after 25 years. To be able to continue the journey for another 25 years in the same precinct is quite special. This is the end of the beginning, but certainly not the beginning of the end.”

The next-door building was gutted, and 200 workers spent nine months adapting it to the needs of the modern data centre, with its focus on energy efficiency, security and redundancy of both power and data feed.

Almost as much time was spent building 200 prefabricated data centre modules in Croatia by a specialist provider, Vertiv. Each module weighs 30 tons, and the Rosebank building had to be further adapted to take their massive weight. Call it a foundation for the future.

Said Walt: “We’re making a half-abillion-rand investment, not only in the country, but in our people and the future of IS.”