The growth in Internet use, especially in e-commerce, Internet banking and the increased awareness in disaster recovery has led to the increasing demand for data centres infrastructure in Kenya. That is why a provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, icolo.io, recently broke ground for a new data venture in Mombasa, what will soon turn the Coastal city into a gateway to Africa for all the major Internet players and carriers coming to the East Africa region. When complete, the data centre billed “MBA 1” will provide 180 cabinets for customer use with up to 675KW of available customer power.
Mombasa is the landing point for all undersea fibre cables to Kenya and other landlocked countries in East Africa, making it an attractive location for international carriers to interconnect with the region.
This data centre is a purpose-built building that spans over 13,000 sqft of built up area and with redundant power and its own back-up generators, precision cooling and pre-cabled inter connect infrastructure – it is designed and will be built to Uptime Institute’s Tier 3 standard. The full construction of MBA 1 is estimated to cost Sh400million to Sh1billion.
According to Ranjith Cherickel, founder of icolo.io, the vision behind this data centre is to build a Pan-African network of vendor and carrier neutral data centres that provide first class colocation services to clients.
“We are finalising plans for a larger site in Nairobi and expect that it will be fully functional in the third quarter of 2016. This will also be a highly connected site hosting all the major network providers present with the aim of becoming the premier colocation service provider in Kenya,” said Mr Cherickel.
icolo.io’s open access data centre will provide colocation services such as rack space, power, cooling and physical security and redundant connectivity through carriers that will provide networking solutions directly to its customers, as well as remote hand services and high level technical support to its customers. This state of the art facility will serve major businesses in the East African region ranging from Internet service providers, telecom service providers, financial institutions and medical facilities among others, and will be operational by the end of July 2016.
Strategically located near Moi International Airport, this site provides redundancy to the subsea cables landing on Mombasa Island and will become a major networking hub in the region. With this data centre, Mombasa will become a key regional hub and a desired location for global carriers and major multi-nationals to transit their traffic through.
Major carriers including, Access Kenya, Frontier Optical Networks, Jamii Telecom, Liquid Telecom & Seacom have committed to building networking infrastructure to this data centre and supporting customers present there.