Apollonia data centre to be operational in July
A tier-four certified data centre under construction at Apollonia City in the Kpone-Katamanso District is set to become operational in July 2019.
The solar-powered facility, is being being developed under a strategic partnership between Etix Everywhere, Ngoya and AIG-Medallion, would provide a data bank infrastructure for institutions in Ghana and the sub region.
The privately funded project at the cost of $30 million, according to Mr Vaughan Adnams, Director of Ngoya Limited, would be managed remotely to provide services from land digitisation to all kinds of services where people could easily access information on any sector, including issues of flood control.
As a commitment to providing an efficient service, the developers have as well entered into partnership with Whale Cloud, a subsidiary of technology giant, Alibaba, to provide cloud services at the centre for its clients within West Africa.
Efficient tax revenue
Mr Adnams, who took the visiting Alibaba team to the construction site recently, told the Graphic Business in Accra that the facility was to afford governments within the sub-region the opportunity to manage institutional data and enhance an efficient collection of tax revenues.
He said Ghana, for example, lost much of the taxes that were collected because there were no proper technologies in place to help address lapses that caused leakages.
“If the government of Ghana is able to harness adequate technology in its revenue generation processes, it would help address the leakages which would go to reduce pressure off government, businesses and reduce counter processes which would thus, go to increase productivity thereby generating a lot more employment for the people,” Mr Adnams indicated.
He said the partnership with the Alibaba team, which was also pursuing a smart city project in Accra, was one that could go about bringing high yield investment for Ghana and appealed to the government to endeavour to take advantage of the platform the technology era was offering to help digitise all activities within the governance process.
AIG
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of AIG, Dr Samuel Ankrah, for his part, stated that the facility came with specifications, including three independent generators, three independent UPS, independent switchboard, cooling systems, world-class access control and intrusion detection system.
Dr Sam Ankrah (second left) in an interaction with Mr Mu Ji (second right), Mr Vaughan Adnams (right) and Mr Adonis Qin also of Alibaba Cloud.
This, he said, was to provide the centre full transmission redundancies with fibre connections from four different routes, including multiple aerial and underground fibres from multiple metro and long-distance providers.
Dr Ankrah stressed that the track record of project partners ensured the datacenter would not only be the best facility in the sub-region in terms of infrastructure but also in terms of operations.