Mobile, digital life as we know it is unthinkable without datacentres. All of the internet, mobile phones, social media and speedy answers to enterprise business questions depend on these forts of technology. But every fort has its weaknesses. For datacentres, the sheer size of electricity bills, along with painfully high costs in maintaining a multiplicity of technologies, and many other factors, directly impact their profitability.

As private cloud and modular datacentre solutions gain traction locally, South African players peer deeply into the power efficiency of their datacentres, both in energy use and in maintenance. Cloud hosting pushes up power density in racks, which creates a greater requirement for more intelligent cooling in order to sharply reduce power bills. After all, the only certainty in many a datacentre is increasing electricity costs. Meanwhile, the coming together of foundational technologies in pre-built, scalable datacentre solutions can significantly reduce cost and complexity in operations and maintenance.