According to the announcement, East Africa Data Centre is an independent company within the Liquid Telecom Group we’re guessing much like Liquid Telecom Kenya, ZOL in Zimbabwe and others. Liquid claims in the announcement that the new company’s data centre is “the largest and most sophisticated in East Africa.” To back this Liquid says the data centre currently occupies 4 floors with 500 m2 of useable whitespace and 160 racks per floor, in a building with customers like banks, mobile network operators, ISPs and cloud services providers.
The clear benefit for African internet consumers and companies is that more and more data hosting companies will have a new option to host their data closer which just results in faster response times for hosted applications like websites, mobile and web apps, enterprise apps for email, ERP solutions and such. This apart from more enterprise focused services like server co-location and disaster recovery.
Other providers already providing data center services on the continent include Dimension Data, SEACOM, XDSL, Realtime Bytes, Utande even though most have had a country specific drive.
Earlier this week, Liquid also announced the signing of an agreement to interconnect with the fibre network of Tanzania’s government owned fixed network operator Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL).
