One of West Africa’s leading carrier neutral tier III data centres, RackCentre, has announced it will be switching its power source from diesel to gas, to save more than $10 million annually and reduce carbon footprint in all areas of its operations.
The company’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Jasper Lankhorst, disclosed this while speaking at the just concluded 2022 AfricaCom/Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town, South Africa, the organizers said in a statement.
“…the organization is switching its power source from diesel to gas, not only to save more than $10 million a year in operating costs but also to reduce carbon footprint, reduce environmental impact and align with global sustainability data center design trends,” Mr Lankhorst was quoted to have said during the panel session themed: “The Importance of Going Green for the future of Data Centers in Africa.”
He explained that RackCentre, which is a part of the pan-African data center platforms, was undertaking a range of measures that are tailored towards green design principles, including switching from diesel to gas power generation, implementing water-efficient cooling systems, implementing low – Energy air circulation system and sourcing local materials and services wherever possible.
“As a result of these moves, RackCentre is forecasted to be 35 per cent more energy-efficient than other regional data centers, and 16 per cent more energy-efficient than the global average. It will reduce water consumption by 41 per cent, and there will be a 45 per cent saving in embodied energy in materials used,” he said.
Mr Lankhorst further noted that the choice of going green is because customers are demanding a sustainable strategy for the business, but that it is capital-intensive, and should be sustainable.
“They must be as energy efficient as possible and use reliable, low-carbon sources of power to ensure uninterrupted operations, which is in line with the organization’s prime aim to provide 100 per cent uptime,” he added.
Power support in Lagos
In addition to the existing Rack Center LGS 1 data center in Lagos, which supports 1.5MW of IT power, Mr Lankhorst said: “our campus is now being expanded with a new building, the LGS 2 facility which supports 12 MW of IT power. ”
This, the CEO said, provides a total IT power of 13.5MW at the Nigeria campus, built using modern, efficient and green design architecture.
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“We have a principle known as KIA – Keep In Africa, and it’s a philosophy we use in our design and the procurement process to make it sustainable with the availability of local knowledge and local skills to be able to build and operate it,” he added.
Lingering concern
Amidst the upsurge of the devastating impacts of climate change ravaging communities across the world, especially in the African continent due to a significant surge in greenhouse gas emission, major firms have been advised to consider switching to environmentally friendly forms of energy to keep the global target of keeping emissions below 1.5 degrees alive.
Established in 2012, RackCentre focuses solely on providing best-in-class data center colocation services and free interconnection between “carriers and customers” knowing this gives customers a technically superior, physically more secure, and lower-cost environment for their information systems.
According to the statement, the carrier and cloud neutrality advantage allows customers to manage traffic to get better value, lower latency, and higher resilience and creates an open market for partnerships between customers, networks, cloud and content providers, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria , and managed service providers.
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