Vodacom has launched a new data center at a cost of 100 million South African rand (US$9.7 million) to help companies cut costs and ensure system continuity.

IT operations are a crucial aspect of any company's operations; one of the main concerns is business continuity, said Wally Beelders, executive director of Vodacom Business. If a system becomes unavailable, company operations may be impaired or stopped completely, he explained.

The 1,000-square-meter Vodacom Business Data Centre has the capacity to host about 20,000 dedicated client servers or 650,000 virtual machines. The center will offer basic Web hosting, service co-location, dedicated hosting, managed storage and managed backup.

"The new data center will ensure that a company can continue to run without having to worry about their IT infrastructure," Beelders said. "Clients will benefit from a safe and cost-effective data center environment, including back-up services that ensure the highest level of availability and network performance."

Vodacom is banking on high energy costs to drive clients away from setting up and running their own data center infrastructure, which involves the associated costs of back-up generators, UPS (uninterruptible power supply), air cooling, building management systems and other services.

The Vodacom Business Data Centre is classified as a Tier 4 data center and is designed to host mission-critical computer systems, with fully redundant subsystems and compartmentalized security zones controlled by biometric access control methods.