Sky’s the limit for cloud computing in SA
SA strategically located for serving Sub-Saharan Africa
The arrival of global data-centre leaders, in tandem with massive increases in data traffic due to Covid-19, has created unprecedented demand for cloud computing services in SA.
This week, Teraco Data Environments announced that construction had commenced on the largest single-site data centre in Africa, whichwill ultimately provide 16 halls with 1,000m² capacity for computer racks in each hall. The total size of the facility will be 50,000m².
This firmly positions Teraco among the so-called hyperscale data centres rolled out in SA in the past 18 months for the two world leaders in this sector, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Neither discloses capacity, but a hyperscale data centre is usually at least 3,000m² in size, housing at least 5,000 computer servers, according to a typical industry definition.
The new Teraco hyperscale data centre, known as JB4, is scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2022 in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg.
It will be supplied with 38MW of power.
“South Africa is strategically located at the tip of the African continent and, as a result, is positioned as a technology and data centre hub for Sub-Saharan Africa,” said Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo in a statement on Tuesday.
“This is further underpinned by growing undersea and terrestrial fibre connectivity to the rest of
Africa. The continued increase of cloud adoption in Africa is also being enabled by investments in critical infrastructure, including hyperscale data centre facilities such as JB4.
“This will enable global cloud clients to service not only the South African market but reach the rest of the Sub-Saharan African region as well.”
Sabelo Dlamini, a senior analyst for telecommunications at the International Data Corporation, says the arrival of the “hyperscalers” has increased the adoption of cloud services, as well as addressing security concerns that some enterprise organisations had with moving their workloads to cloud. “This has opened the space for other players in the cloud also to grow,” he says. “We have seen reports of a drastic increase in data traffic in South Africa from the internet exchange points due to Covid-19 lockdowns, and we are expecting to see this trend continuing.
“The rest of Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to follow suit, with several investments across the region in building data centres.” Hnizdo told Business Times this week the move by enterprises onto public cloud infrastructure, such as that hosted by Azure, AWS, and Google, was complementary to Teraco, rather than representing competition.
“Most large enterprises, banks and retailers are adopting a hybrid cloud deployment strategy,” he said. “This means that components of their critical IT infrastructure are being moved into public cloud, while large components still remain on-premises.”
Hnizdo said that owning data centre infrastructure was no longer core to banks, retailers and other enterprises, and that such facilities were largely reaching their end of life. “Their critical onpremises systems are thus rather being deployed in ecosystemrich third party data centres. Here it’s far more economical and resilient for them to deploy as opposed to building their own new facilities.
“Large banks, retailers and enterprises in Europe, the US and Asia are no longer building their own data centre facilities as these are non-core.”
According to Dlamini, Teraco as a carrierneutral data centre has “a unique role” to play in the market.
“In addition to providing vendor-neutral data centre services, they are required to provide neutral co-location services, internet exchange points, and content delivery networks to support carriers, service providers, and content delivery organisations.
“We are seeing increased growth in these services, which data centres owned by vendors or carriers are limited in providing.”
The Teraco announcement comes less than a month after Japanese telecommunications giant NTT and its South African subsidiary Dimension Data announced that construction had commenced on a Johannesburg data centre that will provide 6,000m² of server space — and will be completed in early 2022.
Dimension Data already operates 11 data centres across Africa.
NTT said the expansion in Johannesburg was part of the growth strategy of its Global Data Centers division, with more than 160 data centres in more than 20 countries.
“This demand for capacity is driven by local and international clients’ strong need for robust co-location infrastructure across Africa,” said NTT.
Grant Bodley, CEO of Dimension Data, said that Africa’s digital transformation would be accelerated with the right infrastructure investments.
“This partnership, bolstering our already significant data centre footprint, comes at a time when demand for digital content, cloud services, new technologies such as the Internet of Things, mobile money and content delivery networks are on the rise,” he said.
Dlamini agrees that there is more room for growth.
“In addition to customers requiring localised play, there is still more room for improvement in providing computing and storage requirements. With the increased adoption of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, driven by digital transformation, everything needs to be in the cloud, and the demand for computing and storage requirements will continue to increase.”
For this reason, said Hnizdo, Teraco was looking at a 15-year horizon. It was investing R4bn in the new project, but it would not stop there.
“Our investment in the facility is taken on a long-term investment horizon view. We see more public cloud players wanting to deploy in South Africa. We have great infrastructure, and given the latency to Europe — 180 milliseconds, which is too long for real-time cloud interaction — this becomes the ideal base for public cloud providers to deploy their cloud platforms to service most of SubSaharan Africa.”
Meanwhile, one of the main global challengers to the dominant hyperscale providers, Oracle, is expected to deploy a data centre in SA in the coming year.
The announcement was first made by company founder Larry Ellison during the Oracle OpenWorld conference last year, but no target date was given.
This week, during a Business Day Focus 4.0 webinar, Oracle SA senior sales cloud leader Shireen Pillay confirmed that the data centre was still on track, and likely to arrive next year.