Etisalat announced the expansion of its SmartHub with the completion of its third location opening in Kalba with a state-of-art Tier 3 data centre facility addressing the growing demand and enhancing geographical diversity.
The new data centre will offer a geo-redundant ecosystem for global players to expand their regional presence. The new facility is also selected to be the landing for Africa-1, a new subsea telecom system connecting Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
This will help SmartHub facilitate faster connectivity to various global partners, the company said.
“As one of the biggest neutral carrier hotels, Etisalat’s SmartHub data centres will be an ICT bridge between continents always supporting critical business activities of global customers.
SmartHub Kalba will enable us to increase our capabilities and global capacity to meet our international clients’ expanding needs for infrastructure across Asia, Africa, Europe, Middle East and the Americas.
We at Etisalat are committed to making ‘SmartHub’ a preferred location for carriers, cloud service providers, Internet exchanges and companies looking for a carrier grade data centre,” said Ali Amiri, group chief carrier & wholesale officer, Etisalat.
The company further added that the new facility is scheduled to be operational by the first quarter of 2022 providing a robust data centre infrastructure evolving to meet future demands including the landing of a new generation of submarines as well as becoming a disaster recovery hub for Etisalat’s customers in the Fujairah SmartHub.
The Middle East IT infrastructure market expects to grow at a CAGR of over 6% during 2020–2026. Data center adoption has seen a rise and hyperscalers, greenfield data centers, as well as co-location providers, are eying the market, which has publicly stated that data is the new ‘oil’.
The demand for Data Centres has been underpinned by technological advances and the increasing adoption of cloud-based services.
