Minkels to provide custom cooling at MainOne datacentre

Minkels, part of the publicly traded company Legrand, has been chosen as datacentre supplier for West African connectivity and datacentre solutions company, MainOne. MainOne has implemented in Africa an undersea fibre optic cable connecting West Africa to Europe and the construction of West Africa’s largest commercial Tier III+ Datacenter, MDXi.

MainOne observed a strong market demand for a world class, carrier-neutral co-location datacentre in Nigeria in 2012. MainOne, in search of best of breed solutions, conducted a global search for a more flexible cold aisle containment system to accommodate the various needs of their global customers with racks of varying widths and heights.

According to Funke Opeke, CEO of MainOne: “The market demand rapidly outstripped the co-location space in our landing station and necessitated the construction of a purpose-built Tier III facility with 600 rack capacity. We developed the Lekki datacentre MDXi over 24 months and launched it in January 2015 to keep up with customer demand.”

“We considered manufacturing in China to meet our specifications and also direct purchase from various OEMs. A global evaluation followed including top industry players, custom cooling vendors, and local manufacturers who were evaluated to provide racks, cold aisle containment, PDUs and accessories for customers at our datacentre.”

“Minkels met our requirement to provide a cold aisle containment solution, flexible concerning rack width and height, able to accommodate a free standing 47U solution, and lend itself to caging. In addition, Minkels has the technical ability to understand our requirements and quickly make custom engineering modifications based on experience with many of our global customers.”

MainOne has successfully deployed the cold aisle containment solution and custom support frames to meet the requirements of their international co-location customers who will be deploying their server racks shortly.

“As the premier datacentre in West Africa, it is important we lead in innovation, professionalism and delivery of world-class solutions. Our partnership with Minkels ensures our ability to respond to customers with different technical requirements and volumes. Feedback from our customers is that they are impressed with the Minkels cold aisle containment solution and it makes the decision and process of co-locating with us easier.”

“Given the success of this first-of-its-kind, custom cold aisle containment solution deployment, we are in early discussions exploring the possibility to partner in the further deployment of Minkels solutions across MainOne’s MDXi datacentres to ensure we remain competitive in a dynamic and growing market.”

Christiaan van Terheijden, CEO of Minkels, is also delighted with the partnership with MainOne: “We are very proud that MainOne has selected Minkels as their datacentre supplier. We see MainOne as a company that knows how to drive Internet use across the West African region. MainOne invests heavily in growing the broadband ecosystem in West Africa. This benefits both inhabitants as Internet enabled business models across the region. We are more than happy to be part of that development.”