The new Riverfields Hyperscale Data Centre Facility being built in Riverfields, Ekurhuleni, is an indication of the continuing growth in demand for hosting services in Africa, says neutral data centre firm Teraco Data Environments CEO Lex van Wyk.

The demand is driven by Big Data and cloud computing, as well as enterprise organisations that use these services locally. Many of these services have either not been available locally or have been available only in limited functionality, owing to high latencies to connect to far-flung international hosting facilities.

“Hyperscale computing has grown enormously, as has demand for co-location facilities. We anticipate significant uptake as more service providers recognise Africa as a growth market,” he says.

Teraco started building the 24 MW, 6 000 m2 data centre on January 12, will open the new facility on November 1, having switched carriers earlier, on October 15.

The new data centre comprises six data centre halls, each with about 900 m2 of technical deployment space and 100 m2 of storage space. Each hall is supported by a Teraco energy module. Each 4 MVA energy module has various electricity generator sets, uninterruptible power supply sets and transformers. Each supplies power to a single data centre hall.

Van Wyk adds that the Riverfields facility differs from its data centres in Isando in that its design is based on a warehouse concept. The 150-m-long, double-storey data centre facility is designed to use free cooling to reduce energy consumption when the ambient temperature is below a certain threshold. Further, each of the data centre halls has its own set of chillers to feed cold air to the cabinets.

Teraco interconnection and peering head Michele McCann highlights that the increased cooling is the result of demand from client for higher power cabinets.

“It is not so much about how much data centre space you can provide for clients, but more about how much power you can provide to each cabinet,” she says, adding that the growing demand for high-level computing is reinforcing demand for more power.

This need for high power underpinned the investment in the area, as the data centre facility has access to several electricity power grids, which also provide redundancy.

Power is an appropriate gauge of the size of data centres and the amount of power in this data centre, the largest in Africa, provides context for evaluating the scale of the investment, notes Teraco CFO Jan Hnizdo.

“The Riverfields data centre facility represents about 20% of the capacity of the South Africa-based outsourced market. Over the next two years, we will invest about $100-million. We are developing the civil structure of the facility completely and we will roll out the power plants and the halls in phases, as demand grows over the two years.”

Teraco is building the data centre in anticipation of demand for cloud in Africa, as it expects many of the large cloud service providers to deploy some of their services in the new Riverfields data centre facility.