Dan Kwach, managing director of Africa Data Centres East Africa Region.

Africa Data Centres, the pan-African network of interconnected, carrier-and cloud-neutral datacentres, has had its Tier III certification renewed by the Uptime Institute for its Nairobi-based datacentre.

According to the company, the certification was renewed in recognition of the facility’s design, which supports “any planned work on the site infrastructure without disrupting operations”.

Tier III Concurrently Maintainable criteria are founded on the capability to complete planned facility maintenance or modifications on a scheduled basis, the Uptime Institute’s CTO, Christopher Brown communicated.

“It is with great pleasure that Uptime Institute Professional Services announces the successful achievement of the Tier III Certification of Design Documents for the Africa Data Centres (ADC) NBO1.1, NBO1.2 and NBO1.3, Phase 1 in Nairobi, Kenya,” the Institute said.

Dan Kwach, managing director of Africa Data Centres East Africa Region, said: “The achievement of this milestone is a credit to the hard work and world-class leadership of our team and cements Africa Data Centres’ commitment to providing its customers, across the continent, with access to the best-in-class, interconnected data centre facilities.”

He added that Africa Data Centres can proceed to constructed facility certification, stressing the importance of Tier Certification in the datacentre industry. “It signifies that your facility meets rigorous standards and more importantly, can meet and support the needs of your customers, as determined by an unbiased third party. For us, it was critical to provide customers with the peace of mind that we provide a highly efficient, low-risk environment.”

“As a key player in this region, Africa Data Centres takes very seriously the economic upliftment of Kenya and its neighbours through digitisation. As such, contributing to the region with world-class data centre facilities is a need that we are proud to meet.”

Africa Data Centres has presence in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Cape Town, Harare, and Kigali.

In the last six months, the company has announced acquisition plans for Nigeria and Ghana and recently concluded the acquisition of a ‘beyond tier-IV – standard’ datacentre facility in Samrand, South Africa.

The company described the Standard Bank facility as a Tier IV datacentre “to provide maximum levels of security and reliability for banking IT systems.”

In October Africa Data Centres embarked on the construction of what it describes as one of the largest datacentres on the continent - a US$100-million site in Lagos.

In a statement Liquid Telecom said it has raised US$307-million through a rights issue to fund its datacentre expansion strategy in Africa.