• Thursday, March 28, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

CloudExchange partnership with Huawei set to transform West Africa data centre

Huawei

Data Centre infrastructure in Nigeria and the West African sub-region being driven by rapidly growing digital economy will soon receive a boost with CloudExchange partnering Huawei.

Recognising the enormous market potential CloudExchange, a leading system integrator in West Africa and also a provider of end-to-end Information Technology (IT) system solutions has made plans to enter the IDC market.

According to Xalam research, Internet Data Center (IDC) capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was recorded at 230 MW in 2020, with an average annual growth rate of 30 percent over five consecutive years, and is expected to balloon to anywhere between 350–450 MW by 2024.

It’s impressive potential that has attracted enterprises to invest in IDCs and build large-scale data centers in Nigeria, experts said.

For example, RackCentre — a data center operator — announced in 2020 an investment of $100 million, adding 13 MW capacity to its existing Nigerian data center setup. Another established Colocation (Colo) company, 21CTL, also announced the construction of a new 36 MW data center as part of its ambitious expansion plans.

Read Also: Huawei climbs higher in Fortune Global 500 list 2021

As a new IDC entrant, however, CloudExchange needed to find a way to differentiate itself, to establish a foothold in a fiercely competitive environment. And to set itself apart, the company decided to partner with Huawei, in order to be able to offer superior IDC services, faster response times to requirements, more flexible capacity expansion, and more reliable data centers overall.

Faster Response to Requirements. It takes roughly one and a half to two years to build a traditional data center in Nigeria — far too slow to keep up with the rapid growth of IDC services. To accelerate the process, CloudExchange chose a Huawei prefabricated modular data center solution: with most devices pre-installed and pre-tested in the factory, the data center simply has to be hoisted onsite. As a result, the construction period of the entire project was reduced to just seven months, meeting CloudExchange’s need for accelerated deployment without compromising quality nor impact the convenience of services that end-users receive.

On-demand construction with reduced initial investment. In a traditional data center, several buildings are constructed to form a data center campus. This means a high initial investment, a low initial load rate, and high overall energy consumption. After deploying Huawei’s prefabricated modular FusionDC solution, however, the data center supports online capacity expansion, with each layer able to function as an independent data center unit. Capacity can now be quickly expanded as needed, without any interruption to live services, reducing the initial outlay required as well as energy costs, all the while increasing the data center load rate. In addition, FusionDC is configured with an intelligent management system, which provides intelligent visualization, intelligent Operations and Maintenance (O&M), and intelligent optimization to improve O&M efficiency and data center reliability by implementing proactive prevention.

Indeed, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry is one of the main drivers of Nigeria’s robust economic growth, supporting the rapid development of a range of industries from e-commerce to online banking and digital government.

The most populous country in Africa, Nigeria has maintained steady economic growth over the past two decades and today stands as the largest economy on the continent. Unsurprisingly, Nigeria also has the highest number of African Internet users, some 90 million or more, the tenth highest national figure in the world.