MainOne, a major provider of telecommunications services in West Africa, has announced that its US$40 million data center in Lagos will begin commercial operations in the middle of January 2015.

The Tier III purpose-built facility, the largest of its kind in the region, was originally expected to come online in the third quarter of 2014.

MainOne CEO Funke Opeke told the Nigerian daily newspaper ThisDay that the company is working on landscaping and putting on minor finishing touches. She added that MainOne is already planning its next data center, which will also be used as a backup site for the one in Lagos.

Building big
MainOne, a subsidiary of Main Street Technologies, was founded in 2010 to manage the building and operation of the privately funded Main One Cable System, stretching from Portugal to South Africa. Using the open access fiber backbone, the company soon diversified into colocation, managed hosting and cloud services.

In 2013, MainOne decided to build a data center in Lagos that would be reliable enough to attract multinational companies which operate in Nigeria, but currently prefer do host their data outside the country.

The new carrier-neutral, 3,500 square meter campus will initially offer space for 600 racks. It features complete network, cooling and power redundancy in accordance with the Uptime Institute’s Tier III guidelines.

The facility is aimed at a wide range of customers from global oil and gas companies to local SMBs.

Project Manager Gbenga Adegbiji told ThisDaily that the Lagos data center has adopted DCIM software by Schneider Electric – most likely the StruxureWare suite of products.

“Outsourcing of Data Centre and connectivity services to a reputable provider like MainOne ensures businesses can adopt more cost effective models of consuming technology to allow increased focus of valuable company resources to drive business development and growth,” said Opeke.