Data centres in the Cloud Era

Global cloud experts believe the industry is entering an era of massive cloud enabled data centres run by third-party organisations – including immense, virtualised structures operated by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google – capable of optimising costs and maximising service availability for clients.

It is a concept that has resonated with South African carriers and network operators who have welcomed the idea of a neutral environment – where traditional business rivals can interconnect their networks. In the telco space, Telkom has been quick to endorse the concept, on the back of vendor neutrality's acceptance and growth around the world.

For data centre managers, the advantages of vendor neutrality are found in the benefits of being able to select service providers strategically in order to reduce costs, while being able to connect to vendors quickly and easily.

For enterprise clients the advantages can be found in the resulting ecosystem where multiple service providers aggregate and offer a diverse range of services that are only a simple interconnect away.

A conflict free environment, an open market and choice

…the true value of a vendor neutral data centre

The vendor neutral data centre focuses its efforts on the management and maintenance of the facility and limits its activities to a fixed set of value layers in order to avoid conflicts of interest with upstream service providers. These include carriers, network providers, ISPs, cloud services providers, content providers, data storage providers, disaster recovery specialists and many others.

This model creates an ‘open market’ and a community into which clients within the data centre can add value.

Vendor neutral data centre providers concentrate their effort on the "basic" layers in the range of services provided to data centre clients: space, physical security, power, environment management and monitoring, fire protection and interconnects.

A key benefit of the vendor neutral model is freedom of choice. Essentially, a vendor neutral environment allows the client to connect to any ISP and route traffic between any network service providers (NSPs) via public peering. The NSPs could include local and international carriers, application service providers and other content providers.

Next week’s blog will look at the role of the vendor neutral data centre in the era of ‘the cloud’.

The colocation value proposition

COLOCATION …provides secure, cost-effective data centre infrastructure for your business-critical IT and hosting infrastructures. 

WHY CHOOSE COLOCATION?

•      A practical balance between cost and security
•      High availability infrastructure
•      Carrier diversity
•      Low cost interconnects
•      Round the clock access to an experienced support team

 

HOW COLOCATION SERVICES WORK: A data centre is one of the most critical elements of your IT infrastructure. However, such a complex facility can be extremely costly to build, operate and maintain. Colocation at a vendor neutral data centres will save you considerable cost, time and resources, and brings you the benefit of advanced infrastructure and the widest choice of connectivity available.

KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS 

• Reduces costs and complexity
• Maximises ROI
• Reliable, dependable and secure:
• Resilient power and cooling systems
• Premium-grade physical security
  Range of services providing new technologies and competitive business advantage:
• Choose only the services you need – cabinets, power, remote management, open colocation, secure dedicated caged spac
• Flexible scalability

Africa Cloud eXchange (ACX)

In terms of population and landmass, Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Amazingly, a majority of the 1.5 billion people living on the continent survive every day with little to no access to electricity.” (Africa – a continent in shadows. 2009)

Due to the lack of reliable power and infrastructure around Africa, an opportunity exists to establish South Africa as a central hub from which international connectivity and cloud services providers are able to support the rest of Africa’s needs.

Africa Cloud eXchange (ACX) allows South African and African cloud providers to host their platform in the most fibre connected and energy resilient data centre environments in Africa. Teraco’s provision of a dedicated physical infrastructure environment opens up South African infrastructure to the rest of the continent.

Together with existing benefits like free peering through NAPAfrica, cost effective interconnects, access to major carriers (local and international), access to content providers, resilient power, 24/7 support and the highest levels of security, Teraco is the natural choice of data centre environment to colocate cloud services.

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