Local Internet service provider RSAWEB announced the acquisition of their second Data Centre facility, located in Cape Town. The new facility was purchased from a leading financial services provider.

“We are exceedingly proud to announce the acquisition of our new Data Centre” commented RSAWEB Managing Director Rob Gilmour. “The acquisition was strategically made in light of increased demand for Cloud services. South African businesses are starting to take note of the advantages of Cloud hosting as opposed to traditional hosting models like in-sourced Data Centres and dedicated servers." Gilmour also cites the noted increase in innovative technology companies and community-driven digital bodies such as Silicon Cape as factors driving the growth of Cloud in the mother city.

Earlier this year RSAWEB introduced South Africa's first true Cloud Server product, offering consumers needing to host locally a Cloud hosting experience only available through overseas Cloud giants such as Rackspace and Amazon. To date, over two thousand Cloud servers have been provisioned on the RSAWEB Cloud, all featuring 'servers in seconds' deployment, giving immediate availability to resources.

Gilmour adds that one of the most significant aspects of the newly acquired Data Centre is the ability to enable dual Data Centre redundancy: "The geographic location of the new facility in relation to our flagship Data Centre in Cape Town is a huge competitive advantage. Both Data Centres are directly connected by fibre links - enabling us to replicate data and provide unparalleled redundancy for mission-critical hosting solutions. Further redundancy is added as both Data Centres operate on separate Eskom power grids, and are connected via separate Telkom exchanges." The new facility also boasts high-speed fibre links to Telkom, Neotel and RSAWEB's own fibre network.

Looking to the future, RSAWEB has Johannesburg in their sights for future acquisitions: "As has been the case historically, our strategy going forward is to build and own our own Data Centres. We are currently looking for suitable acquisitions in Johannesburg..." concludes Gilmour.

The new Cape Town Data Centre is set to come online in late December 2010.