Data centre co-location has become a serious consideration for technology executives, especially those without the deep pockets to maintain their own data centres. CIOs are deliberating on co-location to extract opportunities to drive growth and value, in turn enabling economic prospects beyond company and country borders. The Infrastructure Masons estimates that by 2030, the size of the global data centre co-location industry is predicted to reach $155.4 billion.
“Africa has 1% of the global digital infrastructure while having 18% of the world’s population and 4% of global GDP,” says Open Access Data Centres’ (OADC) CEO, Dr Ayotunde Coker. “OADC’s analysis indicates that there are about 100 data centres in Africa, but the reality is that the continent needs 700-plus data centres.
“Closing the digital gap is essential to closing the prosperity gap, but Africa must increase its digital infrastructure tenfold to meet data storage and processing demands,” says Coker. “Driving consumption and transformation is possible and the importance of digital infrastructure is profound. We expect to see significant progress in establishing and launching new data and hyperscale data centres in Africa.”
According to Coker, World Bank and International Telecommunications Union research demonstrates that a 10% increase in broadband penetration can add up to 2.5% to a country’s GDP, with even greater significance for emerging economies. He emphasises that while broadband penetration is essential, it’s broadband adoption that enables a country to derive true economic benefit. “He says there is tangible proof that broadband transforms communities, enabling such sectors as education, healthcare, agriculture and commerce to thrive.
Adoption requires the right prices for devices and the right pricing and affordability for broadband outside urban environments. “Local data centres must provide co-locating organisations with high-quality, well connected, carrier-neutral and independent services. This is where an organisation like OADC fits in.” He adds that digital infrastructure starts with local data centres holding and managingdata, with global cloud providers and local companies comfortably coexisting. Local companies are carving out niches and global providers are offering different cloud services, but he stresses the importance of integrating global cloud capabilities with supporting the growth and efforts of local companies to ensure they can compete and expand. He also urges reducing reliance on imports and fostering local manufacturing.
Reducing latency issues
“Data centres stimulate local economies through job creation encompassing construction, engineering, design, and operations; building competitive advantage and economic development. Co-location provides the infrastructure and cloud provides the accessibility.
“From an economic impact perspective, digital infrastructure has a multiplier effect and, for example, spending $10 million on building a data centre can provide potential returns of up to 50 times the initial investment.
“From an enterprise point of view, co-locating means CIOs can disentangle themselves from the daily distraction and costs of private, on-premise data centre management. They can migrate as and when ready, transitioning to cloud services while retaining ownership and control over their existing infrastructure, simultaneously exploring custom or public cloud solutions for specific workloads or applications.
“A multi-tenant environment still requires the CIO to think of organisational ICT enterprise architecture as in-house. Security also remains the CIO’s domain to secure the enterprise across heterogeneous multi-cloud and internal IT services, with the peace of mind of co-location dealing with physical security and the benefits of aggregated costs and infrastructure.
“A phased migration allows for leveraging existing investments in software, hardware, and infrastructure, but different workloads necessitate different deployment and migration choices. Migration can be a ‘healing’ and revealing process, revealing risks, dependencies, potential gaps in an organisations infrastructure that may have been overlooked or where opportunities exist to refresh infrastructure.
“On migration to cloud, it is vital to have a clear understanding of business criticality and dependencies of each application as not every application is cloud migration-ready. While some workloads perform best in the cloud, some should be on own infrastructure and others can benefit from a hybrid IT approach. “If you try to launch certain applications ahead of others, you may negatively affect the performance and operation of missioncritical services. However, the multi-tenant data centre retains its benefits whichever cloud migration option is adopted.”
A key priority is to ensure that the chosen multi-tenant data centre has a robust, fault-tolerant infrastructure that allows flexibility for rapid growth and scalability with operational cost management.
Cables and communication
Coker says that the west coast of Africa is now well-served, benefiting from the recent deployment of Equiano and of the 2Africa subsea cable project, with its many landing points. The east coast is catching up, with connections and routes facing into Asia, the Americas and Europe. 2Africa on the East Coast has a landing point in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, into one of OADC’s four South African core data centres.
“The challenge is achieving inland penetration and last mile connectivity,” says Coker, “but we are seeing innovation and investments into building this infrastructure, with fibre an essential component.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) also presents significant operator opportunities for data centre growth. AI requires having the right kind of hyperscale facilities with comprehensive connectivity and typically with compute power close to the point of use. Enterprises in multi-tennant data centres are able to rapidly flex their infrastructure to meet AI demands. We expect demand for AI to drive AI computing into the data centres we’re building.
“Data sovereignty is another crucial game changer. By maintaining control over pan Africa data, African countries can become data exporters, attracting significant investments and substantial economic opportunities through cross-border data services. “At OADC, we are building vendor-agnostic data centres with open access connectivity and networks, enhancing Africa’s digital landscape, reshaping the ICT industry with a pan-African data ecosystem and demonstrating the transformative power of digital infrastructure. Sustainability and openness are both our philosophy and reality,” concludes Coker.
