Connecting data centers across Africa

Nokia recently announced the provision of its 7250 IXR interconnect router platforms with 400G-enabled interfaces to Africa Data Centres, a division of Cassava Technologies. The solution aims to offer cost-effective, high-capacity interconnection services to customers in multiple African countries.

Africa Data Centres will deploy the 7250 IXR routers running the Nokia service router operating system to run Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) 3.0 certified interconnection services. The platform will enable the company to offer its customers ethernet-based virtual cross-connects, cloud-onramp, inter-dc connectivity and continent-wide remote peering services. It explains that MEF 3.0 defines the rigorous specifications and standards for these services and the application programming interfaces, or APIs, used to enable them, thereby accelerating their development and implementation.

In addition, the company will deploy the Nokia network services platform (NSP) to automate the deployment and management of connectivity services. The NSP aims to accelerate time-to-market for connectivity services that can be easily consumed by customers, allowing workloads to be deployed in any location and to be interconnected transparently, reliably, and securely.

“Connectivity is the bedrock of the digital economy, and our customers expect the very best interconnection services between our data center locations. We selected Nokia because its solution provides MEF 3.0-compliant connectivity, giving our customers scalable, reliable and secure access to their applications, data and workloads – wherever they are located. In addition, the automation enabled by the Nokia NSP simplifies service implementation and deployment, allowing our customers to create flexible, scalable and reliable ICT infrastructure more easily and cost-effectively,” says Africa Data Centres CEO Tesh Durvasula.

Nokia senior VP Webscale Business EMEA Manolo Ortiz adds: “Increasing adoption of cloud applications is driving the need for more scalable, flexible and automated data center interconnection. We are delighted that Africa Data Centres has selected the Nokia 7250 IXR platforms to interconnect its data centers. Our solution ensures it has the capacity to meet the future demands of its customers while reducing operational costs and increasing operations efficiency through automation.”