MTN Business completes one of the largest live infrastructure enhancement projects in the Southern Hemisphere

The MTN Business Gallo Manor data centre has undergone a major retrofit that will see it aggressively expand its Managed Cloud services in alignment with its ICT strategy going forward

MTN Business is proud to announce the complete enhancement of its Gallo Manor data centre, situated in Johannesburg. The business recently undertook a comprehensive expansion and technology refresh of its main data centre to further cement the company’s competitive hosting environment for businesses.

The magnitude and capability of the Gallo Manor data centre has always been a key highlight for MTN Business, with the hosting infrastructure being amongst the first for the South African market, when initially launched over a decade ago.

“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, to ensure our customers can take full and immediate advantage of technology innovation. Therefore, given the critical nature of this data centre, we chose to undertake a complete live refresh.”

From a technical standpoint the state-of-the-art the data center 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 6 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. As a result, the facility has been designed to meet the ever increasing power requirements of modern IT equipment, and provides customers with optimal power usage management functionality. Moreover, MTN Business is now able to have a more accurate view of high consumption and impact areas, which allows for more precise measurement and overall enhanced management of the facility.

Additional notable changes include, but are not limited to, the following; 

• Enhancements to the power and cooling redundancies and efficiencies – replacement of the old chillers plant with new cooling towers. These are now Hybrid towers that use little or no water but are rather air cooled.

• Improvements to the security and Building Management Systems (BMS) – the new system has a 24 hour monitoring station that includes new CCTV and access control monitoring.

• Upgrades to A and B feeds across the whole data centre.

• A new fire protection system has been put into place.

• A new staging area has been added to the facility.

• And on the look and feel side of things, the reception has been upgraded and refurbished.

“Growth; corporate governance policies; as well as carbon reduction are becoming key aspects for businesses consideration today and smart organisations understand this. MTN Business continues to proactively move with these changes to assist customers in reaching such goals within the telecommunications environment. This enhanced Gallo Manor facility will provide our enterprise customers with a fully Opex Pay-per use Model, 24/7 managed hosting environment with specific power and data usage efficiencies management capabilities and of course, all this backed by a highly acclaimed customer service excellence experience.”

Concludes Gahagan-Thomson; “Congratulations to our dedicated and highly skilled project team who worked alongside our strategic MTN Business’ partners to ensure the successful completion of this large-scale project which allows us to confidently state that we can offer customers the best service, functionality and latency times across Africa.”