After a diligent assessments and evaluations by experts from The Uptime Institute in the United States and the United Kingdom to ensure Raxio Data Centre meets the stringent requirements of Uptime’s Tier III Certification, it has finally received the Uptime Institute Tier III Certification becoming the first certified Tier III data centre in Uganda.
They received the certification on Tuesday, 20th October 2020 but made official yesterday Tuesday, 10th November 2020.
With the certification, Raxio becomes one of less than fifteen (15) Tier III privately owned carrier-neutral data centres in Africa and second in East Africa. The Uptime Institute’s teams evaluated all aspects of design and equipment, such as power, cooling, and fire suppression and detection.
James Byaruhanga, Raxio Data Centre General Manager described the achievement as a turning point for Uganda and the East African region.
“The Tier III Certification by the Uptime Institute demonstrates our ambition to achieve the highest standards, and validation that we meet global standards of modern data centres. This also demonstrates our long-term commitment to existing and future customers as we provide colocation of their data infrastructure,” he said.
A Tier III data centre requires no shutdowns for equipment replacement and maintenance. A redundant delivery path for power and cooling is added to the redundant critical components of Tier II so that each and every component needed to support the IT processing environment can be shut down and maintained without impact on the operation and provision of services to customers.
Concurrent maintainability across all critical subsystems is actually one of the most important driving design characteristics that many clients look out for when outsourcing their data centre needs as it also ensures full redundancy in the event of unexpected shut downs or failures.
The Tier III certification is a clear commitment that the Raxio will deliver the highest level of service availability for customers who require Colocation Data Centre Services for Disaster Recovery and Cross Connect in the fast-growing ICT sector. The Certification is of paramount importance to customers with the most demanding needs providing business critical services to customers, such as those in the financial services sector, as well as creating the conditions for international customers looking to bring next-generation services into Uganda.
Raxio’s facility also incorporates sustainable features developed using international engineering and operations standards to mitigate rising costs of energy while providing respect for the environment. With this combination, Raxio Data Centre is setting the standard for premium colocation services that organizations consider for disaster recovery and business continuity to mitigate business risk management to their operations.
Meanwhile, Raxio is hosting the Uganda Internet eXchange Point which allows networks to directly interconnect and freely exchange data traffic at a common point making the internet cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
Raxio is being built at the Namanve Industrial Park same as to where the state-owned DC is opened by the government through the National Information Technology Authority (NITA) Uganda, last year. It was officially opened by President Museveni.
Namanve industrial park was chosen for the data centre because it has about 10 Independent Metropolitan Fibre cables. It is also on the highway to Kenya where Uganda picks up Sub Marine Fibre capacity and therefore about 8 fibre connections to Mombasa for internet transit. The location is perfect.
Raxio was projected to be opened and launched in the Q3 2020 (Est for September 2020), however, due to Covid-19 pandemic caused delays.
