"This facility has been instrumental in driving our business model of excellence and will continue to do so into the future due to, amongst other things, its location, infrastructure magnitude and size," says Angela Gahagan-Thomson, managing executive at MTN Business. "Of course, looking at technologies such as cloud computing, virtualisation and convergence, and the important role that these will continually play on the operational utilities of business today, a substantial upgrade investment into Gallo Manor was a key objective of ours in 2011."
From a technical standpoint the state-of-the-art the data centre has been engineered and built around uptime and TIA-942 standards without compromising the use of innovative technologies and best practices to support efficiency, high availability and the highest level of physical security.
The Gallo Manor expansion sees the total footprint size of the data centre at 2000m2 with another 500m2 already earmarked for expansion, thus allowing for seamless growth for colocation customers, when required. With six main data centres and 11 third-party hosting sites, Gallo Manor is geared towards becoming the flagship facility for hosting and cloud services for MTN Business.
"This enhancement talks to MTN Business' rapid expansion initiatives in support of our growing managed hosting product offerings," adds Gahagan-Thomson. "We understood the need to provide a facility that is not simply viewed as a data centre, but rather a technological 'launch pad' for our value added services to ensure customers can scale their business technology innovation as necessary - all while benefiting from improved cost efficiencies, greener functionality and unsurpassed service and maintenance excellence."
To ensure that MTN Business delivers the highest power availability and uptime to customers an additional redundant diesel generator set has been installed, should the entire feeder grid fail for an extended period of time. Furthermore, all racks are being fed power from 2(N+1) UPS sets, with sufficient battery backup.
