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Today I attended the launch of Telkom’s new data center offering called Cybernest. The guys over at MyBroadband did a good job of covering the press release, but in this post I’ll share briefly what stood out for me on the day.

I’ve been in many state of the art data centers around the world over the past few years and the Telkom one I visited, named Bellville 2, seems to be up there with the best. The data center was designed from the ground up with redundancy in mind. There’s two power feeds coming into the building from 2 separate sub-stations and they have dual generators backing that up. And to counter Diesel shortage they keep 78 000 liter diesel on-site!

What’s really struck me during the tour is how smallish companies can benefit from this type of great solution by outsourcing the hosting management to a 3rd party. Companies can spend millions to build in-house solutions and still not be able to reach the service levels from provided by such a managed facility.

We ended the tour with a demo of the Cisco Telepresence solution. We use video conferencing at work, so the concept is not new to me, but the equipment in this specific solution is really world class. It greatly improves the interactions with the remote party and solves many of the problems with traditional video conferencing solutions. They had a connection going to another data center in Gauteng, and with a 20MB dedicated link the quality was excellent.

What I initially though would be a marketing and networking event actually turned out really useful. I would definitely recommend looking at the Telkom option when you considered 3rd party managed hosting.