Mr. Sola Akinsanya, the President of the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), recently, led the board and management of the Association on a facility tour of brand new Digital Realty Nigeria located in Lagos.
Nigeria’s premier carrier neutral data centre operator, in October 2023 opened the second data centre (“LOS2”); a state-of-the-art facility that offers customers an additional one megawatt of IT capacity.
LOS2, located on Medallion’s Victoria Island campus, is interconnected with Medallion’s existing LOS1 data center, currently rated as the most interconnected facility in the West African sub-region and the top peering point for the region.
This makes the campus an ideal location for subsea cable, metro fiber, mobile services, over-the-top providers, and the country’s internet exchange, the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (“IXPN”), to connect efficiently in a low latency environment, enabling these connectivity providers to better serve and grow their customer bases.
On 27 October 2023, Medallion formally rebranded its services and facilities to Digital Realty, the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centre, colocation, and interconnection solutions.
The acquisition of Medallion in 2021 marked a significant milestone in Digital Realty’s Pan-African expansion strategy.
Since then, the company has committed to invest more than US$2bn over the next decade in Africa’s technology infrastructure and has already progressed acquisitions and expansions aimed at delivering on this commitment, most recently with the acquisition of Teraco in August 2022, South Africa’s leading carrier-neutral data centre and interconnection services provider.
Mr. Akinsanya said that the team visited the Digital Realty Nigeria data centre located at Saka Tinubu, Lagos, to support the company’s efforts to expand its capacity and consolidate its leadership as a major digital infrastructure hub in West Africa.
“As Nigeria moves towards a digitally transformed nation, data centers are the backbone of this drive. Businesses, governments and end-users, all depend on data centers (either captive or multi-tenant) to host, process, analyse and access their data, directly or indirectly.
“Just like NiRA is the registry for .ng Internet Domain Names and maintains the database of names registered in the .ng country code Top Level Domain, data centers facilities like Digital Realty Nigeria, are also designed to help businesses store, distribute, and interpret data using a variety of hardware and software tools that help IT departments manage data and maintain the IT infrastructure. We are proud of Engineer Nnamani and his team for driving digital infrastructure revolution in this country”, he said
The NiRA President called on individuals and businesses to localise their data hosting as means to strengthen the naira and also ensure data sovereignty is attained.
He applauded the management of Data Realty for investing in the Nigerian market and called for more investments in the ecosystem.
In this response, Engineer Ikechukwu Nnamani, the CEO, Digital Realty Nigeria, said the company’s a trusted data center solution provider for many of the world’s leading enterprises.
He said the 1MW IT load LOS2 data centre is equipped with 232 racks and next to its LOS1 campus and provides customers with a secure data meeting place to power their innovation and efficiently managing data gravity challenges.
Nnamani said the LOS2 also provides access to the 2Africa subsea cable system through diverse fiber routes to Medallion’s LKK1 facility, the infrastructure supporting the operations of the 2Africa subsea cable system, thereby enabling reliable, high-speed connections to the new cable’s 46 locations across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
For over a decade, Medallion data centre campus (now Digital Realty Nigeria) has been at the forefront of the Nigerian digital economy through the provisioning of carrier neutral data centre services in both Lagos and Abuja.
Over that period, the company has solidified its spot as the “go-to” provider for fast, efficient, and cost-effective data centre and connectivity services when time to market and affordability has become essential.
NiRA’s president was accompanied on the facility tour by members of NiRA executive board and some members of the management team.
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