Africa’s first prefabricated Data Centre launched

Cloud Exchange West Africa, a colocation, IT support and managed services provider from West Africa, has partnered with Huawei to launch the first Tier IV prefabricated data centre on the continent.

The modular, prefabricated data centre is located in Lagos, Nigeria. Glad Dibetso, CEO of Cloud Exchange, said that the growth of Nigeria’s digital economy contributed to the development of the partnership between Cloud Exchange and Huawei. He noted, specifically, the effect that an underdeveloped infrastructure would have on Africa’s digital future.

“We all need to improve ICT infrastructure as it is the bedrock of digitalization,” he said. “(But through) the efforts of our employees, partners, clients and industry stakeholders have achieved a green, Tier IV data centre.”

With this data centre, Cloud Exchange plans to expand service offerings to include Tier IV colocation, interconnect and cross-connect, managed network and security as well as public and private cloud services.

Adetoyese Oyerinde, the Head of Data Centre and Operations for Cloud Exchange West Africa, emphasized the fact that an Uptime Tier IV certification supports a guarantee of high availability at the facility: a minimum of 99.995% uptime.

“This translates into total redundancy, continuous cooling, fault tolerance and unmatchable reliability that has not been witnessed before in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said. “Tier IV also promises just more than availability: it promises reliability, it promises excellences, it promises adaptability.”

The data centre market in countries throughout Africa is growing rapidly. The Nigerian market alone is expected to grow at a rapid 17% CAGR through 2026, reaching $218 million USD. The South African market will grow almost as quickly, with an expected 15.7% CAGR through 2026. Recently, Oracle announced its first African cloud region in Johannesburg, South Africa. With this move, the company will join Amazon and Microsoft in offering cloud services in South Africa.