Liquid Telecom’s subsidiary, East Africa Data Centre (EADC) has received Tier III Certification, thanks to its efforts in delivering 100% uptime in IT and cooling systems as well as electricity supply.
In particular, EADC invested $5 million in a new Kenya Power sub-station as a measure to heighten its uptime capabilities. The investment was motivated by power issues that forced it to roll back to a backup plan that is powered by diesel.
The certification was awarded to EADC by Uptime Institute, a Seattle-based advisory firm that focuses on performance improvements, effectiveness and reliability of vital IT infrastructure for businesses in terms of collaborations and independent certification.
“EADC’s certification is a reflection of its dedication to securing excellence in the realm of data and hosting solutions,” said Uptime Institute President R. Lee Kirby.
What this means is that the organization has proved its reliability in providing uninterrupted service for companies that store data using EADC’s facilities. Some of these companies include search engine Google and social media giant Facebook that have their regional caches at EADC. Locally, the Kenya Internet Exchange Point (KIXP) is served by EADC, not to mention multiple banks and commercial organizations that are EADC’s clients.
Dan Kwach, EADC General Manager says that this certification puts the company on the global map based on its capacity to offer guaranteed services to clients that need hosting of critical and sensitive data.
“This is an important step in data centre guarantees in Kenya and East and Central Africa, as EADC joins the relatively few data centres across the world in gaining the Uptime Institute Tier III Design Certification,” said Dan Kwach the EADC General Manager.
In summary, Tier III data centre are utilized by larger organizations and businesses with 99.982% uptime and less than 1.6 hours of downtime annually. This puts EADC a step away from the crème de la crème of uptime certification, Tier IV, which serves enterprise corporations and offers up to 99.995% uptime as well as 26.3 minutes of yearly downtime.
