Eaton canvasses co-location in data centre operations

TO effectively manage the boom in data growth across the African continent, power management firm—Eaton has recommended the co-location strategy in data centre operations in Nigeria and others.

According to Data Centre Segment Leader, Eaton Electrical Sector, Deon Ferreira, ‎a data center is an important facility that centralizes an organization’s IT operations and equipment, and where it stores, manages, and disseminates its data.

Ferreira, at a Data Centre training workshop organized for journalists in Lagos, said data centers house a network’s most critical systems and are vital to the continuity of daily operations, stressing that co-location of this facility will to a larger extent help business development, especially the Small and Medium scale Enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria and other countries in Africa.

He said co-location strategy help, especially the SMEs to reduce cost and focus on other business development strategies that will be both beneficial to them and the economy as a whole.

In Nigeria, the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) puts SMEs in the country at about 17 million.

The power management firm also estimated that about 90 per cent of data centre infrastructure operating in Nigeria, both at the public and the private sectors, need optimization, stressing that
reliability of data centers and ‎security ‎are top priorities for organizations.

He disclosed that Nigeria is however a destination of most pre-fabricating or pre-packaging data center infrastructure assembled at remote factories, he said.

He said that storage network infrastructure in financial institutions could be improved upon or meet the volume of data they generate saying the same for the telecommunication industry, Oil and Gas and other sectors to country’s economy.

Ferreira who reckoned that what Nigeria really need is more premium data center infrastructure said that the volume of data being generated in the country is way beyond the essential or superior data center infrastructure in use in most companies.

Data center architectures and requirements can differ significantly. For example, a data center built for a cloud service provider like Amazon EC2 satisfies significantly different facility, infrastructural, and security requirements than a completely private data center, such as one built for the Pentagon that is dedicated to securely maintaining classified data.

Regardless of classification, according to Ferreira, an effective data center operation is achieved through a balanced investment in the facility and equipment housed which really need to be improved upon here in Nigeria.

Also speaking, Regional Sales Manager, West Africa, Eaton Electrical Sector, Charlse Iyo‎, who confirmed that there have been clamour for co-location in data centre operations, especially in Nigeria, said, “Enterprises Plan to Spend More on Data Center’ is missing in most cooperate organization reckoning that without that the bane of cost for a standard infrastructure require real time planning and investment”.

According to Iyo, there is guarantee on Return on Investment (RoI) as promising savings of $50,000 to $75,000 per UPS modules via lower contracting costs and materials.

He said with the presence of Eaton in Nigeria organizations with data center infrastructure are guaranteed 100 per cent safety and security.

“Eaton is data center power and cooling equipment vendors with pre-fabricated, pre-integrated electrical infrastructure solutions for mission critical facilities .They come in three configuration options: a pre-tested package that includes UPS, switchgear, static switches, controls, and monitoring; a package of UPS, switchboard, batteries, and interconnections that comes on single skid; and a shipping container that includes UPS, switchgear, batteries, HVAC, and fire safety equipment.”