| Responses from a local... > - Inconsistent electricity supply (brown outs are somewhat common) No serious data center in South Africa is affected by this. All have batteries and diesel generators. > - Poor physical infrastructure (at least a decade ago, copper cable theft was common) Luckily copper theft affects DC's and fibre less. With redundancies it is manageable. > - Business-unfriendly practices - I don't have the exact details, but you often have to run things through a local company with sufficient black representation. Sounds innocent enough, but does create a monopoly you have to deal with. Effectively a tax or bribe depending on perspective. Yes this is a long term problem with South Africa. It stems from the ruling party (ANC) being super corrupt and embracing victim mentality to shift the blame. But there are often ways around Black Economic Empowerment not involving bribes. > - Poor connectivity to the rest of the world (slowly getting there with more fibre cables arriving) There are tons of cables now. We rarely see international outages. Since COVID also a couple of additional redundancies. > - (Edit) Severe water shortages, at least a couple years ago in Cape Town. I don't think this affected DC's much. And it's not like we had empty taps. I remember just using sprinklers less and topping up my swimming pool from roof-collected water instead of drinking water. Water shortage is hopefully being addressed long term and reservoirs are mostly full. |
It does mean higher operational costs since you're going to be paying for the unreliable electrical service in addition to regular usage of on-site electrical generation. So I wouldn't say no one is affected by this, but I will acknowledge the effects aren't measured in visible downtime.