It is an open secret that technology grows at an alarming rate and in a world where several business functions leverage its offerings in a bid to stay competitive, there are cases where such a dependence cannot be as efficient. In this case, some of the existing data centres are built on ageing design principles because they were put in place a decade or so ago, making their upgrade a taxing investment. Some issues with data centre involve people who take part in their development and management, but that is a topic to another day.
It is imperative that people who go into this business take notes from existing and modern models to offer a better product.
Having established these concerns, a new player has entered the local data centre business, which is a good thing as it will give customers more options. Dubbed icolo.io, the firm has announced that its services are ready for commercial applications at its carrier neutral centre (‘MBA1’) in Mombasa.
“MBA1 will reposition Mombasa as the Gateway to Africa from a connectivity perspective. The lack of true carrier neutral has meant that large international customers have passed East Africa over in favour of other locations in Africa to deploy services,” said Ranjith Cherickel, Chief Executive Officer at icolo.io.
Mombasa One design is allegedly capable of commitment of 99.999% uptime, with concurrent maintainability to boot. It can also provide up to 900kw of IT load for 226 racks. The single storey structure is equipped with over 550m² of IT space with two separate dedicated Meet-Me rooms for the local network providers to bring diverse routes into the site. Additionally, it will have robust connectivity to the sub-sea cable system infrastructure, as well as a core node for all terrestrial networks reaching into the reach of East and Central Africa.
“By opening our site in Mombasa, Kenyan enterprises have an opportunity to build a real disaster recovery location to be compliant with distance requirements of global business continuity practices,” said Ranjith Cherickel, Chief Executive Officer at icolo.io.
At the moment, icolo,io is in the process of constructing another data center in Karen, Nairobi called Nairobi One (NBO1). The facility will be operational from November 2018.
