Vodacom to open Data Centre

vodacom has announced that it will officially open its data centre in cape town and hopes that with the 16,145 square foot data centre, it will be helping with meeting the growing demand for cloud computing in south africa. while reports indicate that south african businesses are increasingly moving towards cloud infrastructures despite expensive and limited bandwidth, a new 8,700 mile fiber-optic submarine cable system will raise south africa's broadband capacity by more than 500 gigabytes a second by 2012, which will further encourage cloud adoption. the energy efficient data centre is expandable to 32,291 square feet. the facility is seven storeys and has fully redundant electrical n+n configuration. the company expects to save money through energy efficient cooling measures with a fully redundant n+n high efficiency water cooled chiller plant. virtualization, hosted services such as hosted call centres, telepresence, and increased acceptance of convergence have all been major factors in the investment in its new data centres. it wants to establish itself as a leading cloud-based hosting provider in south africa, and it is also aggressively expanding its capabilities across the continent. the company has reduced the space needed to host traditional servers in data centres. it has also reduced power utilization to help reduce its carbon footprint. it will pass the benefits of cloud computing to its customers and enable a flexible and scalable cloud service. all of the major building construction and the envelope of the building have been completed in phase 1. the data centre can be easily expanded by deploying electrical and mechanical services when required.