Teraco begins operations

Issued by Teraco Data Environments
Cape Town, Feb 19, 2009

Data storage operator Teraco Data Environments has opened its Cape Town data centre, and the Johannesburg facility is on track to be ready in the last quarter of the year, says MD Lex van Wyk.

Teraco raised funding of about R100 million from a number of investors, including several who were involved with now defunct telecommunications operator Storm. The company says it is the country`s first vendor-neutral operation of its type.

Planning and the raising of finance and canvassing potential clients for Teraco have been almost two years in the making.

Teraco customers can connect to any carrier, network operator or service provider, as well as any other customer, within the data centre, without restriction. There are standard open interconnection policies between all service providers and customers.

Van Wyk says most outsourced data centres have typically been operated by Internet service providers, bundled with their Internet access or managed hosting services, or by the large IT outsourcing companies, bundled with outsourcing, systems integration or hosted application services.

In contrast, Teraco limits its activities to only providing infrastructure and facilities to avoid all conflicts of interest. Teraco takes care of the practical side of data centre management, such as infrastructure redundancy, climate control, guaranteed electrical power, security and protection and maintenance.

He says Teraco has received endorsements from Telkom, Vodacom and Neotel. It already has several clients signed up for its Cape Town facility, which is located in the southern suburb of Rondebosch.

Customers include WebAfrica and Fastnet. The connection with Neotel is installed, while those with Vodacom Business and Telkom are being made ready.

“The customer pipeline is looking very encouraging and there has been a lot of interest in our Johannesburg facility especially,” Van Wyk says.

The Johannesburg centre will be located in the industrial area of Isando, located about 25km from the country`s main financial hub of Sandton.

“Most data recovery plans specify a minimum distance of 25km from the main operations centre to the storage facility and so this has proved to be ideal,” Van Wyk explains.

He says Teraco focuses on taking care of the physical space and honouring the quite “punitive service level agreements”.

Van Wyk adds that the liberalisation of the South African telecoms market, coupled with the increasing international connections, due to new undersea cable projects, could make this country a hub for vendor-neutral data centres. The local market could emulate the success that London has had with this concept for Europe, he notes.