South African hosting provider MTN Business has completed R80m of extension and power and technology improvements at its Gallo Manor data center in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The work has increased the data center’s footprint by 2,000 sq m as the company prepares to make the data center its main hosting and cloud services site in the country.

According to a report by Engineering News in South Africa, the new data rooms are already 80% occupied and the largest of these rooms hosts 30% of Internet content in the country.

“A substantial upgrade investment into Gallo Manor was a key objective of ours in 2011, to ensure our customers can take full and immediate advantage of technology innovation such as cloud computing, virtualization and convergence,” MTN Business managing executive Angela Gahagan-Thomson told the publication.

Gallo Manor was the first hosting infrastructure environment set up in the South African market.

The data center is built to Uptime Institute and Telecommunications Industry Association-942 standards and the refresh enhanced these by refreshing its DC feeds across the entire data center as well as increasing efficiency in both cooling and power.

Old chillers were replaced with new hybrid air cooling towers and extra power capacity was installed with a redundant diesel generator to ensure the data center’s uptime in the case of a grid failure. Building management system and security improvements were also carried out.

Gallo Manor is now made up for six main data centers and 11 third-party hosting sites.

This is not the only extension planned for the facility. MTN is already planning to add an additional 500 sq m in future.