Liquid Telecom Group launches largest carrier-neutral data centre in East Africa

Yesterday The Liquid Telecom Group announced the launch of a new company within the group: East Africa Data Centre Ltd.

This carrier-neutral data centre in Nairobi is the largest and most sophisticated in East Africa offering secure and reliable space for dedicated hosting, interconnect services, colocation, disaster recovery, network-based services, applications and cloud services to carriers, network providers and enterprises from across the continent.

East Africa Data Centre has been specifically designed to meet the needs of different business segments from across the continent. Customers already present in the building including banks, mobile network operators, ISPs and cloud solutions providers.

East Africa Data Centre is an independent company within The Liquid Telecom Group with a separate management team from its sister companies which include Liquid Telecom Kenya.

The biggest challenges for new-build data centres in Africa have always been the same – connectivity, security and power supply. East Africa Data Centre has been built according to international data centre standards and offers the following:

• Connectivity – The data centre is carrier-neutral with connectivity to the backbone and metro fibre offered by a number of carriers including nearly all local Kenyan carriers and international carriers such as Tata, Level3 and Seacom. Organisations using the data centre can choose any of the providers that are present in the premises.
• Service availability and redundancy – The data centre is the only one of its kind in East and Central Africa and is designed to meet International Data Centre Standards TIA-942 with 99.982% guaranteed availability.
• Security – A sophisticated security and access control system is in place including full-time CCTV surveillance, biometrics, metal detectors, card readers, turnstiles at various access points and staff onsite 24/7/365.
• Power Supply and cooling – East Africa Data Centre guarantees to supply contracted AC/DC power for at least 99.982% in each calendar month. Its mains feed of 11KV is backed up by two diesel generators. An N+1 cooling system is operated at the data centre.
• Comprehensive On-Site Support – Support for customers is available 24x7x365.
• Flexibility – A customer can take however much capacity it needs from part of a cabinet to cages, rooms and whole pods. Connections between customers’ own racks can be installed by the customer with no additional cost.
• Size – The data centre currently occupies four floors with 500 square metres of useable whitespace and 160 racks per floor making it the largest data centre in East Africa.

Dan Kwach, General Manager at East Africa Data Centre, said “Quality data centres are an important element in the creation of an independent African telecoms infrastructure. Our significant investment in this data centre has been driven by demand from across Africa. By keeping African data in Africa we continue to help build Africa’s digital future”