Telkom Business has announced that it has once again received international recognition for its data centre operations, this time in the form of the Uptime Tier IV design certification. This is for the group’s Belville data centre in the Western Cape.
“Not only are we one of three South African companies to have received this accolade, but we are the only one to have two certified data centres from the Uptime Institute, in Cape Town and in Johannesburg,” says Reubin Layman, executive: data centre services operations at Telkom Business.
The Uptime Institute’s classification system is a standard that is recognised worldwide. Through this system members of the data centre industry can benchmark their operations, comparing key components like functionality, capacity and site infrastructure design.
To reach Tier IV certification, the highest and most stringent level, Telkom Business’ data centre operations had to meet all the design requirements for fault tolerance and reliability. According to Layman, this makes the Belville 2 data centre the most reliable and safest option for companies that require hosting space for business critical systems and infrastructure.
“Financial service providers, for example, where service downtime would have an economic impact to their bottom line.”
Fault tolerant infrastructure encompasses every system or component that support IT operations. For example, the failure of a single switch-module will affect every sub-component and equipment component receiving service from that particular switch-module. A Tier IV designed facility will be able to withstand this level of interruption without affecting service delivery.
“The end-to-end system is set up in such a way that it automatically self-heals to minimise the impact on the site so that normal functionality is not interrupted.”
Other key elements that lead to Tier IV design qualification include:
* Ensuring that there is enough capacity to maintain the site when redundant components or distribution paths have been removed from service;
* The site is not susceptible from a single unplanned event or planned work activities; and
* All computer hardware must have dual power inputs.
In addition to Tier IV design principles Belville 2 is equipped with effective air management, virtualisation and free-air cooling, contributing to the facility’s ecological footprint. It is also ideally situated for international connectivity via the undersea optical fibre cable systems that lands at Melkbosstrand.
Combined, all these components make Telkom, through its business arm, the best suited South African telco offer to these key features to any partnership:
* Scalability;
* Agility;
* Mobility;
* Security; and
* Reliability.
