The current macro-economic issues in the country are making it more attractive for companies to leverage outsourced Data Center services to reduce costs and enhance operating efficiency of Information Technology. From South to North, and East to West, the shortage of diesel and petrol is crippling power availability and increasing employee absenteeism due to transportation challenges.

In the face of the lingering fuel scarcity and epileptic power supply, companies are considering more seriously the business case for collocating in commercial data centers which offer extraordinary levels of performance, as against building or expanding in-house data center facilities.

The MainOne Data Center, MDX-I which was opened in January 2015 was built to provide this critical support within Nigeria. It is a purpose built, brick and mortar facility on 3,500 square meters of floor space with 1,500 square meters of dedicated white space, able to house 600 customer equipment racks. It is touted to be the largest commercial data center facility in Nigeria and was designed to meet the Uptime Institute’s Tier III certification standard ensuring redundancy for all critical data center equipment, with no single point of failure.

Built fully cognizant of the peculiarities of the Nigerian environment, MDX-I is situated within reasonable proximity in Lagos to meet standards for disaster recovery of 25km from a primary data center, but distant enough to ensure access to staff based in Lagos in the event of an outage. As a high availability facility for MDX-I’s customers, MainOne incurred the expense to build a dedicated power transmission line and private feeder connection to the National Grid.

This investment has increased the power availability at the facility from the national grid to the data center from the 20% commercial power availability generally available in parts of Lagos to circa 80%. With additional investment in 1,250 KVA Backup Generators in N+N Configuration, and 105,000 liters diesel capacity, the Data Center offers power resiliency that is tough to find within in-house data centers in the region. During the past month, as the fuel crisis hit hardest, Nigerian businesses have had to shut down operations to conserve fuel for power supply over a longer period.

For a lot of organizations, the need to keep in-house data centers running placed more pressure on already scarce fuel supply. Under these circumstances, some businesses were able to create tremendous advantage for themselves by relying on a service provider such as MDX-I, which had the capacity to keep its data center running many weeks or perhaps, months after everyone else has run out of power. For companies that transact online, the availability of the data center means the opportunity for more business and revenue generated rather than no diesel, no business and no revenue.

In these difficult times, businesses are able to reduce their operational costs and eliminate uncertainty by leveraging predictable costs and high availability from a service provider such as MainOne. MDX-I provides a cost-effective, secure way of housing, accessing and protecting customer Computer equipment. This translates to businesses being able to deploy IT resources more effectively, saving time and money otherwise used to create and manage the physically secure space for housing their specialized equipment.

The outsourced model also enables secure remote access for critical IT personnel, thus employees are able to ensure service continuity from remote locations.

The MDX-I data center is built and operated to world-class standards and offers a level of reliability and affordability that makes it particularly attractive to businesses with mission-critical applications. The facilities provide the additional benefit of being directly placed on MainOne’s highly reliable network and offers interconnection with other major network operators and Internet Service Providers right within the premises.