The Making of MDX-I: West African First Tier III Data Center

What do we call Digital Economy? It refers to an economy that is based on digital computing technologies. Increasingly, the "digital economy" is intertwined with the traditional economy making a clear delineation harder. Nowadays, businesses are increasingly done online everywhere, with more reliability and accessibility for users. A striking example would be Amazon.com, Inc., often referred to as simply Amazon, an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company which is the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States. This dynamic grows also gradually in Africa. Which means that local data centers would probably start to be built to respond to the market need. Actually, it has already started especially in Nigeria (West Africa) thanks to the dynamism of MainOne (data centers construction company) where a Tiers III Data Center has been built in Lagos: the MDX-I.

During the construction of this Tiers III Data Center (99.98% availability in a year) surprisingly no casualties were recorded. With a 6 MVA Power Capacity, 4 Chillers of 600KW capacity each, a building management system, a demanding access control procedure, a security system and a fire-prevention system, this data center can be easily depicted as a World Class one.

It has been built to respond to the growing development of the digital economy in Africa shown by educational online programs, e-commerce platforms, e-payment for instance. This first West African Data Center is already the pride of all West Africans and hopefully will not remain endlessly the only one in this part of the continent.