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The 5IR and widespread adoption of AI will demand more agile, readily scalable infrastructure. Colocation with the right partners will unlock opportunities in the industry 5.0 era. This is according to Dr Ayotunde Coker, Chief Executive Officer of Open Access Data Centres, who was addressing a webinar hosted by OADC in partnership with ITWeb.
Dr Coker said AI’s impact on digital infrastructure encompassed a need for high rack densities, more sophisticated cooling, increased connectivity density, a requirement for specialist compute chip sets and compute platforms, and dense peering and interconnect DCI. These new demands compound existing challenges such as insufficient space in corporate data centres, a lack of redundancy, the highcost of compliance, IT skills shortages and the need to meet green policies.
“The new AI era will increase infrastructure complexity, but organisations don’t have to build their own AI-ready infrastructure from scratch. They need to focus on putting their capital where it’s needed, and achieving agile infrastructure, lean technology and lean capabilities to get a competitive edge,” he said.
He said colocation enabled organisations to bring AI into the business, while their colocation partners worried about the inference platforms and compute, mechanical, electrical and density requirements for AI.
He said: “Enterprises using colocation services achieve more agility and speed than those who build their own data centres. What we are also seeing with AI is the growth of GPU-as-a-Service, where we build and optimise infrastructure to suit GPU-as-a-Service providers.”
A poll of webinar attendees found that their priorities when considering colocation services were: governance (27%), AI workloads (22%), workload migration (22%), DR and resilience (18%) and cost optimisation (9%).
Dr Coker noted that OADC, a WIOCC Group company, had over 40 data centres in South Africa, offering a fabric of distributed connectivity points across the country.
“Our core-to-edge strategy in South Africa offers distributed scale, vendor neutrality open IX and peering environments as well as comprehensive neutral interconnection,” he said. “With the increased demand for low latency for AI at the point of use, our continuum from core-to-edge becomes compelling. We stick with colocation as our core, partnering with providers for both their success and our success. We stand beside and behind them to deliver vibrant interconnectivity.”
Dr Coker highlighted OADC’s bespoke ‘built to suit’ flexible design, reliable power infrastructure, next-generation connectivity, world-class security, transparent operations and open access edgedata centres, which allow OADC to deliver core-to-edge architecture across South Africa.
“We are making sure our infrastructure is ahead of the curve and creating capacity and capability in South Africa and Africa. We also have a zero-downtime migration framework and have migrated over 20 banks, optimising risk management to ensure the semigrations happen smoothly,” he said.
OADC is investing $500 million inconstructing and operating a pan-African network of world-class, Tier-III certified, client-centric data centre facilities, fully connected into Africa’s largest network infrastructure and specifically designed to meet the demands of telcos, ISPs, cloud operators and the wholesale community, as well as major enterprises such as finance and governments.
