Global network infrastructure specialist Siemon announced that its cabling products were installed in the 3,500 sq. meter MainOne data center located just outside of Lagos, Nigeria. According to a press release, the 600-rack facility is the largest colocation facility of its kind in West Africa and delivers consistent high-level performance, data storage and data security to support leading businesses from across the region.
In the deployment, Siemon and its certified installed partner, Lagos based DBH Solutions, collaborated on the process of designing the cabling infrastructure, which consists of Siemon's high performance XGLO fiber-optic solution with OS2 singlemode and OM3 multimode fiber, and the company's Z-MAX end-to-end Category 6A shielded copper cabling system. A combined total of more than 2,400 XGLO optical fiber links, using 1,200 pairs of OM3 and 1,200 pairs of OS2, were installed for the backbone infrastructure, which connects every cabinet to Cisco Nexus 7000 series core switches located in each of the two main network rooms. The Z-MAX cabling was used to connect servers and work area outlets to access switches and, given the challenging schedule, it provided significant advantages in terms of product handling and ease of installation, according to the data center.
"To successfully establish a facility of this scale, it was crucial to select top quality products from best-in-class suppliers," commented Gbenga Adegbiji, head of capital projects at MainOne. "We needed to specify products that would fully support applications today and well into the future to allow for growth and expansion, and we chose Siemon to enable us to achieve these important objectives."
Notably, MainOne is the only data center in West Africa built to Uptime Institute's Tier III specification, which guarantees 99.98 per cent availability and means no more than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. Fully compliant with the TIA 942 data center standard, Siemon says its high bandwidth cabling systems ensure that MainOne has the most solid and futureproof cabling infrastructure foundation to support its growing customer base, said the companies.
Optimized for next generation backbone applications, Siemon notes that its XGLO fiber-optic cabling exceeds all ANSI/TIA/EIA and ISO/IEC insertion loss and return loss requirements to provide MainOne with 10Gb/s performance and beyond. Meanwhile, the company adds that its Z-MAX shielded system combines consistent best-in-class performance with security and robust noise immunity to easily support 10Gb/s. It also provides the highest margins on all performance requirements for Category 6A/Class EA, including critical alien crosstalk parameters.
"We are confident that with the high performance Siemon cabling solutions we have deployed in our state-of-the-art facility, we will be able to provide quality and reliable services to our customers," said Funke Opeke, CEO at MainOne.