Teraco to expand its Cape Town data centre

Teraco, Africa’s largest vendor neutral colocation data centre provider, says it will upgrade and extend its Cape Town facility.

CEO, Lex van Wyk, said that the African data centre market continues to rise. “The potential for local growth is immense. The African market grew an estimated 15.8% in 2017, with South Africa being one of the top growth locations.”

Teraco said its total power provision has grown to 50MW, nearly doubling annually since opening its doors in 2008. Paradoxically, while the African market is believed to be at the beginning of its cloud-inspired journey, Teraco said it has already made significant progress in assisting several strategic cloud brands to enter the market.

“South Africa is well positioned geographically to service the needs of sub-Saharan Africa and on a colocation basis, it is larger than the next 20 African markets combined,” van Wyk said.

“Teraco has now built four fully-operational data centres and launched Africa’s first hyper-scale facility,” he said.

Cape Town, though a smaller regional market for Teraco, has recently started to flourish due to the increased commercialisation of cloud. Van Wyk said that Teraco Cape Town will be upgraded and extended as more local organisations and international brands look to colocate and offer services.

“The next generation of applications and IT architecture will drive power density demands to levels not seen in traditional data centres. This power-hungry environment will be the driving force modernising legacy data centres. Cooling capacities and uptime requirements will also increase,” said van Wyk.

The planned expansion of the Cape Town data centre will result in a facility five-times larger than the original footprint completed in early 2009. Teraco’s Durban data centre, the smallest of its regional facilities, is also on an upgrade path due to increased demand.

“Responding to current and future client demands is of paramount importance. We have created an extremely robust offering and as a result, there is no other data centre in Africa capable of offering access to the same choice of connectivity, vast content or diverse cloud providers that resides in Teraco,” van Wyk said.

Read: Teraco has finished building Africa’s largest commercial data centre – here’s what it looks like