First Brick Holdings, a US-based investment company, has announced that it is establishing and investing in ‘Raxio Ethiopia’, which will build and operate the first privately owned data centre in Ethiopia
The new data centre will be built and operated as a Tier III standard facility to meet the large demand for high-quality colocation data centre services in Ethiopia.
The announcement comes as the telecoms sector in Ethiopia becomes increasingly liberalised, with recent regulatory changes designed to enable broader technology access and encourage the development of technology infrastructure.
This reflects the regional trend of increased demand for high-quality local storage environments, business-critical systems and data hosting solutions, such as local cloud services, as well as the need for external data recovery sites for business continuity.
The major target industries for Raxio Ethiopia will be financial services, cloud service providers, IT companies, media companies, local and regional companies, and content delivery networks. As the telecommunications sector opens up, new carriers and Internet service providers will join forces to create a new connectivity hub in the country.
The company claims that the data centre will comply with the requirements for uptime, redundancy and upkeep set out in the Tier III standard. The facility will also abide by the principle of neutrality, both for carriers and ISPs as new players begin to enter the Ethiopian market, and for cloud service providers who will be able to operate freely from within the data centre.
Raxio Ethiopia will offer data centre colocation services where customers can house their computing, networking, storage and critical IT infrastructure in an optimally operated and secure environment.
By colocating in Raxio’s facility, customers will benefit from a “shared infrastructure” model, and substantially reduce the operational and capital costs while improving application performance and flexibility. Raxio will also supplement its core colocation offering with several additional services, including cross-connection and remote hands.
Robert Mullins, executive director at First Brick Holdings, said, “Raxio Ethiopia will have a transformational effect on the Ethiopian digital economy by providing a critical and missing part of digital infrastructure in the country. The facility will enable Ethiopian companies to operate more effectively locally, to compete in a regional and global context and will provide an environment where new companies focused on the digital economy can thrive.”
