Cloud Exchange West Africa Limited says it partnered Huawei to build Africa’s First Uptime Institute Tier IV Prefabricated Data Centre to ensure Africa is on the path to information technology transformation, a development in line with global growth.
CloudExchange made this known at the ribbon-cutting and unveiling of the centre in Lagos, recently.
According to its Deputy Managing Director, Olayemi Anifowose, the centre speaks of the unparalleled level of the performance of any data centre and represents the next direction for the African continent as well as for businesses that need to be reachable across the world.
“The Tier IV data centre is the technology of today and the foreseeable future.
“Technology changes from time to time, but Tier IV is going to stay with us for quite a while because it will take something extra to add additional [sic] requirements to what we have right now,” he said.
Anifowose maintained that it is far more cost-effective to run a Tier IV data centre at present, beacause of its level of automation, reliability and availability.
Africa’s First Uptime Institute Tier IV Prefabricated Data Centre, developed by CloudExchange in partnership with Huawei, Photo: PMI
Speaking on partnership with Huawei, he said CloudExchange chose Huawei to develop the centre simply because the latter came out tops beside other considerations.
At the beginning of choosing who the partner would be when we wanted to develop the data centre, there were so many OEMs that were visited across Europe, Asia and so on, but that a number of key factors distinguished Huawei.
He said, “Huawei has the edge in Original Equipment Manufacturers presence in the African continent. There are facts to support this, from having over $7.2bn worth of contract and agreement across Africa to having built about 70 per cent of the 4G network in the continent.
“Just between Ghana and Nigeria, Huawei has over 233 partnerships with other OEMs, clients, partners of ours and people that are running businesses in this region.”
Another reason was because Huawei invested so much in research and development, having edge in competitive pricing. Huawei also provides operational support.
His words, “Huawei has demonstrated huge technical competence, rose up to the occasion and ensured the company met the requirements pose to it.
“We wanted a scale-able solution that would be in line with the amount of money that we had as at that time, and Huawei was able to give us such solution. So, the solution that we have as at today is a scale-able data centre that allows us to grow with our clients without any impact on the operations of the data centre at every phase of expansion.
“So, the solution that we have as of today is a scale-able data centre that as we grow with our client, the data centre size also grows without any impact on the operations of the data centre.”
On his part, the Managing Director of CloudExchange, Glad Dibetso, hinted that the company had been working with Huawei from inception.
According to him, at the core of what CloudExchange does is its belief that infrastructure is the real bedrock.
“At the point that we said we are going to build a Tier IV data centre in 2016, it was totally unheard of in our region.
“We went across multiple countries in the world, majority in Europe and Asia, looking for partners to build us a Tier IV data centre. We made the decision to roll with Huawei and it has really been a fruitful partnership,” Dibetso said.
Earlier, the Managing Director, Huawei Technologies Company Nigeria Limited, Eric Yang, had noted the company has six branches, 18 support centres that cut across 20 locations in Nigeria, and has been providing support for its partners, customers and industries with all units of solutions.
While this enables customers to focus on their line of business, he said, in moving forward, “Huawei will keep innovating all our data centre solutions. At Huawei, we are always behind you.”
