Realtime Bytes takes the cloud to Zimbabwe

Realtime Bytes, a collaboration between Realtime Zimbabwe and Bytes Technology Group of South Africa, is offering cloud services to the Zimbabwean market. The enabling equipment, which arrived in December, has been successfully installed and commissioned in a Tier 3 data centre in the capital city, Harare.

This means the carrier-grade cloud system is hosted in the country’s only data centre at this level, protected with three tiers of power backup, connected via multipath to the Seacom cable, and with multiple local fibre-based service providers within metres of the equipment for cross-connect opportunities. Bytes Technology Group is part of JSE-listed Altron.

The Realtime Bytes Virtual Data Centre, hosted in the country’s most advanced Tier 3 facility, is an innovative IT services concept engendering a creative computing model that is committed to delivering high-availability, utility-based infrastructure solutions that are high-performance, scalable, energy-efficient and eco-friendly.

The virtual data centre (VDC) offering provides clients with access to IT as a service whereby Realtime Bytes, as a service provider, make computing resources and infrastructure management available to customers as needed. Realtime Bytes charges against consumption of resources rather than at a flat rate like other types of on-demand computing (such as grid computing). Its utility pricing model seeks to maximise the efficient use of resources and/or minimise associated costs. Its enterprise-class offering is built on the industry’s most robust, scalable, fully redundant architecture, which results in unmatched performance and availability with 99.9% SLAs.

Once provisioned, the virtual data centre will enable an IT division to access resources on demand that are flexible, agile and supported on high-availability, regionally located hosting environments from production, test and development servers to high-demand, mission-critical application environments. The Realtime Bytes cloud solution will enable an IT division to rapidly deploy systems and infrastructure, eliminating the need for costly, cumbersome individual servers, software and storage, effectively allowing an organisation to reshape its ICT environment on demand at short notice.

The services that Realtime Bytes can deploy now to the Zimbabwe market are:

1)            Virtual servers
2)            Virtual desktops
3)            Storage as a service
4)            Hosted exchange
5)            Hosted CRM/service desk
6)            Monitoring and reporting
7)            Managed firewall including an IDS/IPS system
8)            Managed router service

“These are exciting times for the Zimbabwean market as companies can now move IT capex items to opex and remain viable,” says Winston Mutasa, MD, Realtime Bytes Zimbabwe. “This is the first pay as you go, best fit, deployment within minutes, commercial data centre and cloud services solution for the Zimbabwean market. Blighted by high borrowing and financing costs, CEOs and CFOs alike will find this model ideal for provisioning CIOs with the tools they require to meet the ever changing challenges brought about by technological advancement at an affordable and workable cost.”