American firm to build data centre in Namanve

Raxio Data Centre Ltd a company owned by Roha, a US greenfield investment company, is setting up Uganda’s first state-of-the-art data centre in the Namanve Industrial and Business Park.
Raxio has appointed James Byaruhanga, a former operations chief at Roke Telecom, to serve as its general manager.
According to Robert Mullins, the Director of Raxio, its data centre is the “country’s first Tier III, truly carrier-neutral co-location facility”

“When it opens in mid-2019, this centre will ensure the equipment housed within it operates
optimally, 24/7, in a safe and secure environment. At full capacity, the centre will be able to house up to 400 racks, delivering 1.5MW of IT power,” he said.

The data centre has been designed to global Tier III standards by Future-Tech, a UK specialist data-centre design company with over 30 years of experience.
Raxio has also appointed Symbion, a leading local architectural firm to carry out the civil and structural design of the building. Future-Tech and Symbion are working hand-in-hand to oversee the building and commissioning of the centre.

Mr Byaruhanga said it is a timely investment in Uganda’s Knowledge and ICT sector with wide strategic national benefits that go beyond its primary function of serving as a disaster recovery facility for improved business continuity of financial institutions, enterprises and government MDAs.
Raxio's plan to build a data centre comes at a time when the Uganda government is getting jittery about having its citizen's data in foreign data centres and is working on relevant laws to regulate the data collected by different companies in Uganda.