from DION HENRICK in Cape Town
CAPE TOWN – SMALL and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa are shutting down their server rooms because unreliable power makes the running costs prohibitive.

LNX Solutions, a custom information technology and business solutions firm, has lamented the trend.

“Keeping the lights on is now an affordable non-issue for SMEs,” said Matt Feinstein, Chief Executive Officer of the Cape-based company.

“It’s the need to maintain diesel-powered back-up cooling systems in on-premises server rooms, in particular, that is seeing us receive at least half a dozen enquiries a week from small firms that can no longer afford to power and cool their own servers during load shedding.”

Feinstein added that cooling with fossil fuels was not cheap in a country famed for its sunny skies and lack of oil reserves.

The executive noted South Africa’s SMEs are realising the solution to rising server room costs is to switch off their on-premise servers entirely and forget about going it alone in favour of colocation collaboration.

“As always, the South African spirit of cooperation saves the day. Sharing server rack space at off-site data centres is the way to go for SMEs in a sub-one percent GDP growth economy.”

In addition, recent undersea cable breaks highlighted in stark contrast the disadvantages of opting for public Clouds managed by “faceless” hypersalers. South African users of a well known public cloud provider were left high and dry from March 14 onwards.

Ultimately, however, it is the lack of customisation and inflexibility of the global hyperscalers that make them unsuited to managing the server needs of South Africa’s SMEs, according to Fein stein.

LNX Solutions was founded in 2017. It provides self-hosted infrastructure and solutions to resolve IT problems.

– CAJ News