In 2021 Digital Realty a real estate investment trust acquired majority stake in Medallion in a joint venture with Pembani Remgro.

Prior to being acquired in 2021, Medallion Data center operated two data centres in Lagos and Abuja.

The official rebranding of Medallion to Digital realty held on Friday, October 27th, 2023 at the Eko &Suites Hotel Victoria Island, in the beautiful city of Lagos. It had in attendance, dignitaries and leaders in Nigeria’s Telecom an IT industry converging to celebrate the new alliance and milestone in the industry.

During the rebranding ceremony Engineer Ikechukwu Nnamani, the Visioner and Founder of Medallion date center who continues in the capacity of expressed his excitement about the new alliance.

“In line with our customers and values, Medallion has now been rebranded as Digital Realty, We have made a strategic decision to align with Digital Reality and we are proud to be part of one of America’s largest Public Companies.”

For over a decade, we have 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, as a company, we have solidified our position as the “go-to” provider for fast, efficient, and cost-effective data centre and connectivity services where time to market and affordability has become essential “he said. This is a testament of our commitment to our customers and vision of being a world class organization in technology industry. Indeed, it is a new dawn for Nigeria’s telecommunication sector.” He said.

Mike Hollands, Digital Realty’s  Vice President for Market Development who was beyond excited said “It is exciting now that we are able to build and expand on the existing customers and structures  to continue to grow and expand the business and to also help make internet infrastructure in Nigeria stronger and better,” Collins said.

We are going to take advantage of the huge opportunity to both meet growing customer demand for connectivity in Africa and improve the internet infrastructure that serves over one billion people who don’t yet have proper access to the benefits of the Internet,” he added.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc.  headquartered in San Francisco, CA and founded in 2004 operates as a real estate investment trust, and engages in the provision of data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions.

It offers services in artificial intelligence (AI), networks, cloud, digital media, mobile, financial services, healthcare, and gaming.

In 2023, Digital realty with assets valued at $42billion has generated $4.9 billion revenue and declared profits of $ 373.3 million.

A few days before the official rebranding of Medallion to Digital realty the nation’s premier carrier neutral data center operator launched a second data center dubbed LOS2 in Lagos, situated in its Medallion Victoria island campus.

The new state-of-the-art facility offers customers an additional one megawatt of IT capacity; this will be connected to the existing LOS1 data centre, currently rated as the most interconnected facility in the West African sub-region and the top peering point for the region.

More about Digital Realty

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions.

PlatformDIGITAL, the company’s global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges.

The company gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents.

The move can be described as a response to the demands of its customers for local hosting of contents and data.

Tagged as LOC2, the new data centre comes with an additional one megawatt of IT capacity and will be interconnected with the company’s existing LOS1 data center, touted as the most interconnected facility in the West African sub-region and the top peering point for the region.

Speaking at the launch, which attracted stakeholders from Nigeria’s telecom and IT industry, including the telecom regulator, Engr. Ikechukwu Nnamani, Chief Executive Officer of Medallion Data Centre, noted that the LOS2 is an extension of the existing data centre, which has run out of space.

“The launch of the LOS2 today is an extension because we’ve run out of space in the last one, and customers needed more space and capacity. So, we must view this as an extension of this whole part of Lagos infrastructure development. We still have a long story coming up under the facilities at Lekki, which is part of the Africa submarine cable,” he said.

The LOS2 Data Centre is a 3-floor building with one megawatt of IT capacity and 232 racks. It also comes with 8 kilowatt of rack density, 230V of PDU model and a dual power supply.

Other features include;

• It expands the peering and connectivity capacity currently available in LOS1
• It is less than 1km from the hyperscale LOS# datacenter currently under development
• Redundant fiber connection to LOS1. LOS3, LLK1, LKK2
• Tier 3+ DLR Global operational standard

Also, in terms of electrical, the data center comes with an electrical IT system topology is in 2N configuration, each power room consists of 2600KW UPS system and VRLA batteries providing 5min EOL at 1200 KW per side, cooling technology is DX, redundancy is N+1 in all rooms and a 2x2650kVA generators.

Also speaking, Mike Hollands, Vice President of Market Development at Digital Realty, expressed delight on the launch of the data center, saying Digital Realty was attracted to Medallion having seen the tremendous value in the original data centre.

“We saw 70 networks present here already. We saw the Internet exchange of Nigeria doing tremendously well from this facility. And it’s incredible now that we’re able to build and expand on that by the facility that we’ve built right next door, brand new and ready for our customers to continue and grow and expand and help make the infrastructure the internet infrastructure of Nigeria stronger and better,” he told Journalists on the sideline.

He explained that there has been a tremendous amount of demand by existing customers to expand all the metrics in Nigeria as the economy grows, as people use mobile and social media more.

“There’s a huge demand for expansion and this is what laws to facilitate. It allows the growth of the services that our customers offer. And at the end of the day, the citizens of Lagos and Nigeria are the ones that benefit from better mobile and interconnection services,” he added.