“We are exceedingly proud to announce the acquisition of our new Data Centre” commented RSAWEB Managing Director Rob Gilmour. “The acquisition was strategically made in light of increased demand for Cloud services. South African businesses are starting to take note of the advantages of Cloud hosting as opposed to traditional hosting models like in-sourced Data Centres and dedicated servers.” Gilmour also cites the noted increase in innovative technology companies and community-driven digital bodies such as Silicon Cape as factors driving the growth of Cloud in the mother city.

Earlier this year RSAWEB 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, all featuring ‘servers in seconds’ deployment, giving immediate availability to resources.

Gilmour adds that one of the most significant aspects of the newly acquired Data Centre 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.

Looking to the future, RSAWEB has Johannesburg in their sights for future acquisitions: “As has been the case historically, our strategy going forward is to build and own our own Data Centres. We are currently looking for suitable acquisitions in Johannesburg…” concludes Gilmour.

The new Cape Town Data Centre is set to come online in late December 2010.

Local ISP RSAWEB today launched True Cloud Servers, a cloud hosting platform that allows users to deploy and provision fully operational servers in just minutes. The first of its kind in South Africa, RSAWEB’s True Cloud Servers offer benefits previously unavailable to businesses hosting locally.

The two main differences between True Cloud Servers and any similar products that are currently available are the speed at which servers can be deployed and provisioned, and the flexibility and scalability of the offering.

These are some of the key benefits of True Cloud Servers:

• The user has complete control, with full administrator access to their server, allowing them to select their choice of operating system, applications and configuration
• Resources can be controlled on a day-to-day basis, as the demands placed on the server change
• New server resources can be allocated on demand to cater for resource-hungry applications or sudden website traffic spikes
• Users pay for only the resources they need – in other words, the resources that are actually provisioned
• Servers can be set up and fully operational within minutes

Flexibility and control
The technology behind True Cloud Servers allows flexible control of server resources through the use of Cloud Nodes. Users can maintain optimal server conditions by adding resources from the Cloud Nodes whenever they lack CPU, memory or other resources. Mark Slingsby, Technical Director of RSAWEB, says, “With the dynamic provisioning of resources, RSAWEB True Cloud Server users never have to worry about scalability in the case of increased traffic demands or traffic spikes. Hosting with True Cloud Servers allows users to instantly react to high demands by adding required resources at the click of a mouse.”

Viability of local cloud hosting
Hosting locally allows users to avoid the data transfer latency that is inevitable when hosting with an internationally based ISP. The recent increase in available bandwidth, the sharp decrease in bandwidth costs and the introduction of affordable uncapped ADSL in particular make local cloud hosting an attractive option for South African businesses.

Available configurations
True Cloud Servers are available in the following configurations, all of which include free setup:
Server 256 (R256 per month, 256MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10GB Storage)
Server 512 (R395 per month, 512MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10GB Storage)
Server 1G (R695 per month, 1024MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 20GB Storage)
Server 2G (R995 per month, 2048MB RAM, 2 vCPU, 50GB Storage)
Server 4G (R1495 per month, 4096MB RAM, 4 vCPU, 80GB Storage)

RSAWEB guarantees 99.99% uptime on True Cloud Servers, and will refund users for any downtime experienced.

Free trial
RSAWEB is offering a free trial to anyone who’d like to experiment with True Cloud Servers. This trial is available immediately, and will expire on 30 May 2010. To sign up for the free trial, visit RSAWEB’s website.

We recently visited the Cape Town offices of local web hosting and data centre services company RSAWEB, located in the Cape Town CDB just a stone’s throw from Parliament and the Company Gardens.

Inside, the office consists of 2 floors, connected by a spacious skylit atrium at it’s center. The layout is mostly open plan with breakaway areas for meetings and solitude. The interior design is clean and stylish, but also shows a fun side with the three main boardrooms named Rock, Paper and Scissors. The official Xbox room also provides the ideal area for employees to relax and enjoy some quality gaming time.

RSAWEB is an Internet Service Provider, specializing hosting & connectivity. RSAWEB owns their own data centre infrastructure and provide a full range of enterprise class data centre solutions including dedicated servers, virtual servers, colocation and cloud hosting services.