How Eskom is making data centres appealing

Data centres have for a long time offered large organisations the ability to free themselves from hardware constraints, running applications and storing data in a safe and managed space.

They are efficient, flexible and future-proof in the sense that, for the typical customer, there is no investment in infrastructure.

And now they have a new appeal for South African business. Because guaranteed "uptime" is one of the key selling features of data centres, they have been given fresh impetus by Eskom's mismanagement of the power grid. Until recently, South Africa was substantially behind international trends of companies outsourcing their infrastructure to data centres. However, a rapid catch-up has begun, says Lex van Wyk, CEO of Teraco, South Africa's largest independent data centre operator.

"If you look at international trends, in the US, 30% of data centre space is outsourced, and in the UK, up to 40%. In South Africa, we're only at about 10%. But because of power problems, which those other countries don't have as badly as we do, we may be headed towards 50% being outsourced."

The major South African data centres offering outsourced services are run by Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, Neotel, BCX, IS and Teraco. The latter is the only one of the large centres that can be regarded as fully "vendor neutral", making it independent of major carriers and service providers. Instead, it hosts connection points to all of these providers on its premises. As a result, it is also the only one of the major data centre operators that is aggressively expanding.

South Africa has about 37000m² of capacity in these outsourced centres, and about 6000m² is still available for hire.

Within this space lies a fascinating geographic disparity. According to Van Wyk, well over half the available space - 3500m² - is lying unused in Cape Town, with only 2500m² capacity available in Johannesburg. "About five or six years ago we saw Cape Town preparing for what they thought would be a big influx of new businesses," he says. As a result, Neotel built 1000m² that is now standing relatively empty, Telkom expanded its Cybernest data centre, which now has more than 1000m² available in Bellville, and Vodacom is also believed to have about 1000m² empty.

"They were correct that many people were moving to Cape Town and starting new businesses, but these businesses didn't need as much space as they do in Johannesburg," says Van Wyk.

In that context, it seems absurd that Teraco is still expanding, having opened another 1000m² in Cape Town in February, trebling its capacity there. More dramatically, it's preparing to build a new 5000m² operation in Isando.

And no, says Van Wyk, no one has lost their minds. More than half of its Cape Town capacity has been sold. "At the moment, many large companies and IT multinationals have 'insourced' data centres in South Africa that they manage themselves. There is huge combined capacity: more than 300000m². But insourced will eventually go outsourced, for two reasons: availability and power. It's becoming more and more complex to manage 100% availability when you have inconsistent power supply."

Therein lies the coming opportunity: "When they were first built, most of these were not constructed to the specifications of an outsourced data centre. They get a small generator and try to keep everything up and running. Today, that approach just doesn't work any more."

Arthur Goldstuck is the founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee