Page 1111 - Cloud computing: From paradigm to operation

Assisting developing countries 8

• service operation centre: The management of processes and functions of data centres should be
controlled by a dedicated service operation centre, which will mainly take in charge the
management of access, events, requests, incidents, service desk 24x7, technical components,
applications and IT operations.

As adoption increases, cloud services will continue to drive the evolution of several aspects of data centres
in developing countries, from architecture to software and control processes.

8.3.1 Data centres – Case studies

Case study 1: National data Centres in Zambia
Zambia has established a government owned cloud service provider, the Zambia National Data Centre
Limited (ZNDC). This is a company limited by guarantee through the ICT regulator, Zambia Information and
Communications Technology Authority (ZICTA). The establishment of the ZNDC with three geo-located data
centres will provide a platform for both government and private sector to consume secure, highly reliable
and available cloud Services from the Tier III Uptime certified data centre.
The data centres are not just traditional data centres offering reliable power and cooling services only. They
are modular data centres built on cloud architecture with virtualization as the bedrock. The three data
centres provide on demand cloud services such as e-mail as a service, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), back-
up as a service (BaaS), disaster recovery as a service (DraaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

The high level topology of the data centres is shown in Figure 8-1:

Figure 8-1 – High-level topology of data Centres

The national data centre has three sites that are located in geographically spread areas with a combined floor
space of 1,600 square metres. The sites were chosen based on the country spread so that one site in the
northern part of the country can serve the northern region of the country while the other two will serve the
central and southern part of the country.

The data centres are designed for an average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3. The facility has a
combined rack count of 206 with 24/7 network operation centre technicians and mechanical and electrical
(M&E) staff.

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