They are integral to the digital world, but data centres — which house all the details of our personal and business lives — are surprisingly nondescript.Visitors expecting a futuristic building managed by an army of technicians in white lab coats, and containing humming mainframe computers, would be sorely disappointed.Most data centres are nothing more than a few racks of computer hardware in a corner of an underground parking lot, says BMI-TechKnowledge MD Denis Smit. In fact, with a bit of work, even a home PC can be turned into a data centre of sorts.But the importance of these centres cannot be overstated. They are the meeting and storage point for an increasingly connected world. “All the pipes that connect us together have to connect at some point,” is how Smit puts it.In the past, exchanges that belonged to Telkom were the sole connection point available to South Africans.But growth in the demand for broadband connectivity and investments in high-speed fibre infrastructure h...
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