Teraco to invest R1-billion in data centre expansion

Data centre provider Teraco has announced it will expand its Isando campus facility in Johannesburg in a R1-billion further investment.

Increased demand for additional data centre capacity is being driven by cloud uptake and enterprise organisations wanting to access the Teraco platform, the company said on Wednesday.

The expansion will occur in two phases. Phase 1, currently underway, will grow the facility by 2 000 cabinets — bringing the total JB1 campus capacity to 5 700. Total usable floor space will increase by 4 000sq m, expanding to a total of 12 000sq m across the campus. The new facilities will be ready for service in the third quarter of 2019.

A total of 60MW of power will be reticulated to the site, addressing requirements for further expansion after phase 1 has been completed. The total power available to the Isando campus will reach 80MW, Teraco said in a statement.

Teraco chief financial officer Jan Hnizdo said the Teraco campus expansion follows the recent launch of the Riverfields “hyperscale” data centre facility in nearby Bredell.

Hnizdo said funding for the build is via a combination of internally generated funds and enlarging existing debt facilities from R1.2-billion to R1.8-billion. “Our debt funding partners, Absa, continue to be highly supportive of our business model and are key partners in Teraco’s growth strategy.”

He said that with the recent announcements of direct interconnection to Amazon Web Services Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, Teraco has seen a growing uptake driven by businesses.

“The Teraco platform allows enterprises to have direct private connections to all the leading cloud providers in the most latency-efficient and resilient manner possible. Enterprises can deploy their public, private and hybrid cloud strategies from the Teraco platform, which allows for complete freedom of choice from a cloud provider perspective, as well as significantly reducing the time and cost for enterprises to access these cloud platforms.” — © 2018 NewsCentral Media