Africa’s first hyperscale data centre took 365 days to build

The largest data centre in Africa, JB2-Bredell has been completed after 365 days making it Africa’s first hyperscale data centre bringing more investments from technology giants.

The Bredell Hyperscale Data Centre Facility located in Bredell features over 24 MW of power and 6000m² of technical deployment space is owned and operated by Teraco, Africa’s only neutral data centre vendor.

“The demand is driven by big data and cloud computing, as well as enterprise organisations that consume these services locally, many of which have not been available locally or are only in limited functionality due to restrictions presented by high latencies due to distance,” says Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk.

Bredell is the fourth facility built by Teraco, though the company had earlier promised that the centre would be complete by November 1st also has locations in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg (Isando). Current power provision totals 50MW with over 18 000m2 of white space.

Gys Geyser, Head of Infrastructure Development, Teraco says that the build has not only been the first of its kind, but done in record time: “Teraco designed the facility incorporating different elements of tiering solutions and industry best practices to ensure concurrent maintainability, with added enhancements to cover different levels of fault tolerance. We were able to double the power and cooling capacity, using similar mission critical footprints gained from previous deployments.”

Teraco says internationally, researchers predict the global co-location market will grow to more than $50 billion by 2020, a CAGR of over 12% from 2015 to 2020. A significant portion of this demand is being driven by the enterprise, IT and telecommunications sectors.

“The hyperscale data centre market was estimated at over $1 billion in mid-2015, with significant growth forecast based on storage resource demands in distributed or grid computing environments,” the company says.