American firm to set up first privately owned data centre

Raxio Data Centre Ltd (“Raxio”) is setting up Uganda’s first state-of-the-art data centre in the Namanve Industrial and Business Park.

Raxio was established earlier this year by the Roha, a US greenfield investment company that builds and and develops new businesses across Africa.

Raxio has also appointed James Byaruhanga as general manager.

Byaruhanga is a Ugandan national, with more than 18 years of experience in the ICT industry as a manager in several leading telecom companies and internet service providers.

According to Robert Mullins, Director of Raxio, its data centre is the “country’s first Tier III, truly carrier-neutral co-location facility and is ideally located just outside Kampala’s CBD, a key requirement for disaster recovery and business continuity.

“When it opens in mid-2019, this centre will ensure the equipment housed within it operates optimally, 24/7, in a fully safe, secure and redundant environment. At full capacity, the centre will be able to house up to 400 racks, delivering 1.5MW of IT power,” he said.

The data centre has been designed to global Tier III standards by Future-Tech, a UK specialist data-centre design company with over 30 years of experience.

Raxio has also appointed Symbion, a leading local architectural firm to carry out the civil and structural design of the building.

Future-Tech and Symbion are working hand-in-hand to oversee the building and commissioning of the centre.

Construction is set to start this quarter.

Commenting about the centre, Byaruhanga said it is a timely investment in Uganda’s Knowledge and ICT sector with wide strategic national benefits that go beyond its primary function of serving as a disaster recovery facility for improved business continuity of financial institutions, enterprises and government MDAs.

“We believe that with the growth in data usage and storage and the broader digital transformation of businesses and the public sector being witnessed in Uganda today, a Tier III data centre will be a key pillar to Uganda’s digital economy and will stimulate and support the growth and digitalisation of the Ugandan economy and thus help meet the goals set in the MoICT Data Strategy and the broader National Development Plans,” he said.

He added: “With this world-class facility, we shall attract major global content data networks, cloud services providers as well as regional carriers to Uganda. Other than bringing critical services closer to the local market, this will make internet services cheaper and faster to the end user, but most importantly, bring down the overall cost of connectivity in the country, thus increasing global competitiveness of Ugandan businesses.”