Row upon row of rackable servers, locked up inside black metal cages and surrounded by smiling security guards waving you into carefully air-conditioned rooms with cameras recording every moment is what you’ll find if you visit the newly upgraded Internet Solutions (IS) Internet Data Centers (IDCs), launched to the press at a function Wednesday.
IS has spent R7 million (U.S.$846,555) upgrading its hosting facilities, creating additional space for another 1,500 servers (of which around 200 spaces have already been taken) in Rosebank. The Johannesburg facility — which IS hopes to fill by the second half of 2002 — is matched by one in Cape Town, with others planned.
Apart from the tight physical security and carefully controlled environment, the facilities are insured against power outages by diesel generators, kept warmed and test started every Friday.
All this to ensure that the servers IS hosts (either client-owned or client-leased) stay up and aren’t tampered with. Particularly paranoid clients – Absa Bank was given as an example — can further secure their servers in a separate ‘Vault.’ These vaults can be remotely controlled by the client — so that not even IS engineers can enter without permission — and placed under constant Web-cam surveillance.
For those clients with popular pages, IS also offers a banner management tool. For those clients who like two copies of everything, IS offers a back-up service. It claims to back up three terabytes of data for 4,300 clients every month. And in September it will complement this service with a Storage Area Network (SAN) offering.
Things may be tough in the IT, but IS is betting that demand for its services will continue to grow.