The acquisition comes as a result of a increased demand for Cloud services. It’s clear to us that South African businesses are waking up to the advantages of Cloud hosting as opposed to traditional hosting models like in-sourced Data Centres and dedicated servers. We also believe that the prolific emergence of innovative technology companies and supporting community-driven bodies such as Silicon Cape are also factors spurring the growth of Cloud services in the mother city.

Earlier this year we introduced South Africa’s first true Cloud Server product, offering consumers needing to host locally a Cloud hosting experience only available through overseas Cloud giants such as Rackspace and Amazon. To date, over two thousand Cloud servers have been provisioned on the RSAWEB Cloud!

One of the most significant aspects of the new DC is the ability to enable dual Data Centre redundancy. The geographic location of the new facility in relation to our flagship Data Centre in Cape Town is a huge competitive advantage. Both Data Centres are directly connected by fibre links – enabling us to replicate data and provide unparalleled redundancy for mission-critical hosting solutions. Further redundancy is added as both Data Centres operate on separate Eskom power grids, and are connected via separate Telkom exchanges. The new facility also boasts high-speed fibre links to Telkom, Neotel and RSAWEB’s own fibre network.

As has been the case historically, our strategy going forward is to build and own our own Data Centres. Looking to the future, we have Johannesburg in our sights for future acquisitions, and are currently looking for suitable opportunities.

The new DC is currently being upgraded, and is set to come online in late December 2010.

We are very proud to announce the launch and immediate availability of True Cloud Servers – a cloud hosting platform that allows users to deploy and provision fully operational servers in just seconds. The first of its kind in South Africa, True Cloud Servers offer benefits previously unavailable to businesses hosting locally.

There are 2 key differences between our True Cloud Servers and currently competing products: (1) The speed at which servers can be deployed and provisioned; and (2) the flexibility and scalability of any given solution. The business benefits of this product explained in further detail on our website.

With True Cloud Servers new servers can be up and running in minutes, and new server resources allocated on-demand to cater for resource hungry applications or sudden website traffic spikes. This is the next evolution in hosting…. Hardware as a Service.

The technology behind True Cloud Servers allows for flexible control of server resources through the use of Cloud Nodes. Users can maintain optimal server conditions by adding resources from Cloud Nodes whenever they lack CPU, memory or other server resources. These resources can also be controlled on a day-to-day basis, as the demands placed on the server change. Users only purchase the resources they need, and only pay for what’s provisioned.

As with traditional server offerings, True Cloud Servers give the user complete control with full administrator access to their server, allowing them to select their choice operating system, applications and configuration.

A key factor for business who may consider using cloud services is the recent increase in available bandwidth and the resulting decrease in the costs thereof. This makes True Cloud Servers a viable option for businesses that need to host locally.

With regards to potential security concerns in the Cloud, users have nothing to fear. We, as the Service Provider, do not have access to any of our customers’ servers; each server is independent of the others in the Cloud. Organisations like Google and the UK Government are already utilising similar hosting platforms with great success.

True Cloud Servers are available in 256MB (@ R256 p/m), 512MB (@ R395 p/m), 1G (@ R695 p/m), 2G (@ R995 p/m) and 4G (@ R1,495 p/m), and setup for all of these options are free. Find out more about our packages here.

Curious about this new product? Try it out risk free with our free trial offer.