Africa Data Centres announced latest partner for London Internet Exchange (LINX) Nairobi
The Africa Data Centres, a business of Cassava Technologies Group, has announced that the London Internet Exchange (LINX) has brought them on board as a full point of presence (PoP) for the new East African interconnection hub, LINX Nairobi.
The announcement follows a strategic partnership last month between the two organizations, to ensure growth and opportunities across new markets in Africa, to enhance connectivity and bring digital services to citizens.
Kenya is in a unique position to serve the entire East Africa region with its fast-growing fibre connectivity, through the well-connected submarine cable network that has pathways to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
LINX Nairobi is set to go live in the coming weeks and is the region’s first interconnected, multi-site Internet Exchange Point (IXP). The technical specification of the platform mirrors LINX’s designs in the UK and the US, offering redundancy and resilience for networks peering there.
With this announcement, customers at the Africa Data Centre’s NBO1 (https://apo-opa.info/3pdeBxO) facility in Nairobi will have direct access to the new LINX Nairobi peering community in Kenya via a single cross-connect and will also benefit from additional services such as LINX’s around-the-clock, on-call support and portal access.
In addition, networks that connect to LINX Nairobi from any of the data centre locations will be able to set up peering arrangements with each other, building a strong digital ecosystem in the area and encouraging traffic to be kept local.
“With LINX Nairobi, we are not only creating a hub for Kenya, but for all of East Africa. The rapidly growing region has a huge demand for low latency, high-speed, improved interconnectivity. LINX Nairobi will not only serve local networks, but also attract international Internet providers and hyperscalers.” Nurani Nimpuno, Head of Global Engagement for LINX said.
“ADC has already grown an impressive portfolio of networks at its Nairobi data centre, so it makes absolute sense for LINX to work with ADC. LINX Nairobi will enable connections for all networks collocated at ADC and we welcome them into the new LINX Nairobi ecosystem.”
On his part, Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres said “By adding the LINX PoP in our NBO1 facility, we are able to better support our customers with an even greater variety of interconnection options than we have today.”
“We are very pleased to be working together to further enhance our ecosystem to create more interconnection and peering options to strengthen our ecosystem.”
According to Durvasula, most modern businesses have adopted a hybrid model of private and public clouds for their workloads and as a result, there is a substantial amount of network traffic flowing between data centres, cloud providers, customers making use of cloud services, and ultimately, end-users.
This could present a significant challenge for entities that operate these hybrid environments, as often the available connectivity fails to provide the necessary speed and reliability to handle such high volumes of traffic.
“Having an effective interconnection strategy in place is critical for businesses across the globe as it ensures the efficient distribution of workloads throughout the entire infrastructure, fueling an integrated and resilient network. This PoP is just one more way in which Africa Data Centres is helping businesses across Africa connect to the rest of the world while keeping their data within their own borders.” Durvasula adds.
