MainOne, a data centre and telecoms services solutions provider for businesses in sub-Sahara Africa is getting ready for the completion and launch of its Tier-3 Data Centre, which will turnout to be the largest in West Africa, in terms of size of storage facilities and capacity of service delivery.
The new data centre, which is located in Lekki, Lagos, covers 3,500 square metres space, and will accommodate 600 racks spaces, with redundant power supplies up to 6MVA and a 24-7 network operations center, when completed in the fourth quarter of the year.
It is expected to gulp N4 billion to complete the physical structure and another N3 billion to purchase and install all facilities that make up a tier 3 commercial data centre.
MainOne's Chief Executive Officer, Ms Funke Opeke, gave the information during a media facility tour of the project site in Lagos at the weekend.
According to her, "the project is over 70 per cent completed, and has direct access to MainOne’s entire connectivity platform including its metro and international fiber, Internet backbone, as well as interconnection with all the major networks in Nigeria. It is being constructed to meet the rapidly growing demand for managed computing and network services in Africa."
The new data centre is an expansion of the company's existing data centre in Lagos, that is currently hosting data of big and small organisations and providing services for them.
In technical parlance, a data centre is an infrastructure, built to house the computing operating systems of an organisation. It is a commercial computer room that links all computational devices and operations and allows access and connectivity to all company branches for online transactions. It saves companies and operators the cost of building personalised data centres to run their individual operations.
The commercial data centre being built by MainOne, will house the data of various organisations, and allow their operations to be accessed online 24/7, with high reliability and availability.
Differentiating between tiers 1, 2 and 3 data centres, General Manager, Capital Projects for MainOne, Mr. Gbenga Adegbiji, said the tier 1 data centre referred to a conventional computer room with less operational redundancy, while tier-2 is a more reliable facility with dual system such that if one system goes down the second picks up when manually operated.
The tier-3 data centre, he said, comes with concurrent facilities that allows for easy maintenance and service delivery. All its cooling system, power system and backup system are working concurrently such that if there is a failure in any of the facilities, others pick up automatically without creating redundancy and downtime of any sort, with a reliability of 99.98 per cent.
"The tier-3 data centre has a higher level of reliability and availability, compared with tier-1 and tier-2. With the tier-3, online service could be accessed 24 hours, seven days in a week and 365 days all year round, which makes it adequate for online realtime business," Adegbiji said.
Opeke explained that the data centre would be a further proof of MainOne’s commitment to deploy infrastructure based services within its primary markets, as it would aid the reduction in information technology costs and risks, while enhancing business efficiency and profitability.
"The tier 3 commercial data centre that we are building will help improve the ability of organisations to move their key business processes online as well as accelerate the evolution of Nigeria into a digital economy when launched," Opeke said.
She added: “Access to bundled data centre services and connectivity solutions from a trusted provider ensures organisations save capital costs that would have been required to build and maintain dedicated data centre facilities.”
According to Adegbiji, “The facility is designed to meet rigorous availability standards, and offers a highly secure and reliable purpose built alternative with multiple layers of redundancy on all critical electrical and mechanical components to our customers.
"This guarantees continuous access/uptime to hosted critical applications and data improving the overall operational efficiency and profitability of our customers”.
With the rollout of its Lagos metro fiber network and data centre in 2014, MainOne said it remained focused on taking the lead in the provision of broadband communication services to large corporates, e-commerce providers, government and educational institutions in Nigeria.
