[kictanet] [KICTAnet] TEAMS | EASSY Fiber Cables Cut? SEACOM | LION?

[Michuki Mwangi]

On 3/1/12 1:30 PM, Brian Munyao Longwe wrote:
> But I was talking in the context of getting the content owners who our
> eyeballs go to, to set up their data centers here in-country so that
> all access is 'local'. By default that would mean
> mirroring/replicating their existing data center infrastructure -
> which includes hardware, software, data, etc...
>

I prefer to see the content owners put limited (read relevant data
incountry) and have a private circuit (read peering) into Kenya.

For instance, am happy to have the Google East Africa maps hosted in
Kenya that the whole Google map database.

At the same time am happy to see Google peering at the local IXP with
multiple 10G pipes back to their Mega-data centers in Europe and USA.

> energy for a single facility. Imagine if the following were to
> consider setting up facilities in Kenya?
> - Microsoft
> - Google
> - Facebook
> - General Electric
> - EBay
> - Amazon
> - IBM
> - HP
>

Am happy to see versions of Ebay.co.ke Amazon.co.ke, etc that accept
M-PESA, et al and support local sellers through local payment gateways,
and instead of home delivery, pickups at local points like Posta
locations, etc. It would be nice to have a gmail platform thats hosted
in Kenya, etc. If you can imagine how many individuals and businesses
alike are bound to suffer if all 3 cables had outages at the same time -
remember it happened in Asia 2 years ago.

The bottom line being that if they are building the infrastructure to
support the size of the market - then we are not looking at capacity we
dont already have.


> If all of them set up data centers in Kenya, they would collectively
> need about 500-800MW. Peg this against our current installed capacity
> of 1300MW and we are definitely not anywhere near the top of the list
> in terms of destination of choice for an African data center
> destination.
> 

+1 - unless our focus is to have them implement more regionally focused
content/solutions. Not Global ones.

> Let us not forget that these are all key target tenants for Konza. How
> would we go about meeting their energy requirements? Let alone the
> water requirements for cooling systems and (this may touch some
> nerves) the human resource (skills) required to man and run the
> centers?
> 

You raised a fundamental question in an earlier post. Who develops or is
responsible for the ICT strategy of this issues.