Two megawatts, carrier-neutral, in Mogadishu
Cross-connected to four submarine systems inside the same building. Before it existed, a Somali institution that had to keep records in the country kept them on a server in an office. That was the whole choice.
What is actually behind the door
Written the way you would ask about it in a due diligence call, rather than the way it would appear on a brochure.
Power
- Design capacity
- 2 MW across the facility
- Topology
- 2N distribution — concurrently maintainable, so planned work does not mean planned downtime
- Backup
- Generator plus UPS, with fuel held on site
Cooling & environment
- Topology
- N+1 — a unit can fail or be serviced without raising the hall temperature
- Conditions
- Monitored temperature and humidity, alarmed to the operations centre
- Fire
- Detection and suppression appropriate to an occupied data hall
Connectivity
- Submarine
- Cross-connect to four systems, in the same building as the landing station
- Terrestrial
- Direct onto our metro rings, national backbone and own autonomous system
- Neutrality
- Any carrier may enter; we do not make our own service a condition of racking here
Space & access
- Units
- Quarter rack through to private suite
- Security
- Controlled compound, access logged, escort for non-listed visitors
- Hands
- Remote hands available from the 24/7 operations team on site
Four reasons people rack here
Three of these were not practical in Somalia until this building existed. The fourth was, but badly.
Regulated records
Banks, insurers, telecoms and ministries with an obligation to keep citizen or customer data inside the country, and to be able to show where it is.
Operator equipment
ISPs and carriers placing their own routers next to the capacity they buy, so their network starts at the landing station rather than at the end of a tail circuit.
Content & caching
Platforms and broadcasters holding content close to the audience, which is the only way to stop the same file crossing an ocean once per viewer.
Backup & recovery
An in-country restore point that is not the same building as production — and not a continent away, where the restore itself becomes the outage.
Residency is a question about the rack, not the policy
Somalia’s data protection framework places real obligations on the institutions holding citizen and customer records. Meeting them used to mean choosing between a cupboard in the office and a data centre on another continent — one of which fails an audit on resilience, the other on jurisdiction.
A carrier-neutral facility in Mogadishu with 2N power and cross-connect to four cable systems removes the trade-off. Where the data sits becomes an engineering decision you can document, rather than a compromise you have to explain.
A data centre is one of the few things worth visiting
Specifications are easy to write. Come and look at the power room, the cooling and the meet-me room, and ask the people who run them. Bring your requirements — you will leave with a design and a delivery date.