The East Africa Data Centre hosts Kenya Internet Exchange Point

Established in 2002, KIXP is now the largest Internet Exchange Point in the region and enables Kenyan ISPs to easily exchange traffic within Kenya without having to use multiple international hops. KIXP frees international links from congestion, speeds up data and reduces costs and delays.
The East Africa Data Centre was chosen after a tender process that attracted seven highly competitive proposals. After more than 10 years at its previous site, KIXP needed a data centre which would support its future growth objective of being the regional Internet exchange point for East Africa - and could guarantee connectivity, security and power supply.

Fiona Asonga, TESPOK Chief Executive Officer, said “This is an important strategic decision for the Kenyan telecom market as we herald a new future for Interconnection in Kenya and the region as a whole. We are extremely happy with our choice of The East Africa Data Centre. It has an excellent reputation for quality, reliability and service”.

Opened in September 2013, The East Africa Data Centre in Nairobi is the largest and most sophisticated in East Africa offering carrier-neutral, secure and reliable space for dedicated hosting, interconnect services, co-location, disaster recovery, network-based services, applications and cloud services to carriers, network providers and enterprises from across the continent. Customers present in the building include banks, mobile network operators, ISPs and cloud solutions providers.

Dan Kwach, General Manager at The East Africa Data Centre, said “KIXP’s confidence in us confirms the quality of our offering. By keeping African data within the continent we are all helping to build Africa’s digital future”.

The East Africa Data Centre and TESPOK started working together to migrate ISPs and their infrastructure to the new location on 1 December 2013. This process is expected to conclude on 14 February 2014. A detailed migration plan has been provided to safeguard against any service interruptions.

About The East Africa Data Centre
The East Africa Data Centre has been specifically designed to meet the needs of different business segments from across the continent. It has been built according to international data centre standards and offers the following:
• Connectivity – The data centre is carrier-neutral with connectivity to the backbone and metro fibre offered by a number of carriers including all local Kenyan carriers and international carriers such as Tata, Level3 and Seacom. Organisations using the data centre can choose any of the providers that are present in the premises.
• Service availability and redundancy - The data centre is the only one of its kind in East and Central Africa and is designed to meet International Data Centre Standards TIA-942 with 99.982% guaranteed availability.
• Security – A sophisticated security and access control system is in place including full-time CCTV surveillance, biometrics, metal detectors, card readers, turnstiles at various access points and staff onsite 24/7/365.
• Power Supply and cooling – The East Africa Data Centre guarantees to supply contracted AC/DC power for at least 99.982% in each calendar month. Its mains feed of 11KV is backed up by two diesel generators. An N+1 cooling system is operated at the data centre.
• Comprehensive On-Site Support – Support for customers is available 24x7x365.
• Flexibility - A customer can take however much capacity it needs from part of a cabinet to cages, rooms and whole pods. Connections between customers’ own racks can be installed by the customer with no additional cost.
• Size – The data centre currently occupies four floors with 500 square metres of useable whitespace and 160 racks per floor making it the largest data centre in East Africa.

The East Africa Data Centre is an independent company within The Liquid Telecom Group with a separate management team from its sister companies which include Liquid Telecom Kenya.