Co-location will reduce energy consumption

In response to Eskom's plea for South Africans to reduce their electricity usage, Teraco managing director, Lex van Wyk, says South African companies need to fully embrace co-location and recognise the immediate and longstanding positive impact this will have on energy consumption.

Citing an example, Van Wyk says a company with 100 employees being serviced by an in-house, 30 square metre server room can easily use 80% of their total monthly electrical consumption on this room's power usage.

“In other words, an FD would spend more paying for the server room power usage than on all other power used by the organisation in performing their core business. Co-location centre providers take advantage of the aggregated nature of their operations to adopt energy-saving techniques that are not cost-effective for smaller server rooms.

Van Wyk says South Africa trails Europe by more than a decade when it comes to the adoption of co-location. “We are positive that the uptake of cloud computing, and with it, managed services, will increase the amount of companies currently co-locating.”

According to Van Wyk, it is a simple issue of fully understanding the immense benefits of utilising a vendor-neutral data centre as opposed to building an independent one.

“Clients co-locating with Teraco would not only save on power usage and associated costs, but they would also be greatly empowered to negotiate rates and services when buying or selling from and to other Teraco clients,” concludes Van Wyk.