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Nokia has announced it is providing its 7250 IXR (interconnect router) platforms with 400G-enabled interfaces to Africa Data Centres, the continent’s largest provider of interconnected, carrier- and cloud-neutral data center facilities.

The solution will enable Africa Data Centres, a business of Cassava Technologies, a pan-African technology group, to offer cost-effective, high-capacity interconnection services to its customers in multiple African countries.

Africa Data Centres will deploy the 7250 IXR routers running the Nokia Service Router Operating System (SR OS) to run Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) 3.0 certified interconnection services. The platform will enable Africa Data Centres to offer their customers ethernet-based virtual cross-connects, cloud-onramp, inter-dc connectivity and continent-wide remote peering services.

MEF 3.0 defines the rigorous specifications and standards for these services and the APIs used to enable them, thereby accelerating their development and implementation.

In addition, Africa Data Centres will deploy the Nokia Network Services Platform (NSP) to automate the deployment and management of connectivity services. The NSP will help Africa Data Centres accelerate time-to-market for connectivity services that can be easily consumed by its customers, allowing them to deploy workloads in any location and transparently interconnect them reliably and securely.

Tesh Durvasula, CEO at Africa Data Centres, says connectivity is the bedrock of the digital economy, and customers expect the very best interconnection services between data center locations.

“We selected Nokia because its solution provides MEF 3.0-compliant connectivity, giving our customers scalable, reliable and secure access to their applications, data and workloads – wherever they are located. In addition, the automation enabled by the Nokia NSP simplifies service implementation and deployment, allowing our customers to create flexible, scalable and reliable ICT infrastructure more easily and cost-effectively.”

Manolo Ortiz, Senior Vice President, Webscale Business EMEA at Nokia, says increasing adoption of cloud applications is driving the need for more scalable, flexible and automated data center interconnection.

“We are delighted that Africa Data Centres has selected the Nokia 7250 IXR platforms to interconnect its data centers. Our solution ensures it has the capacity to meet the future demands of its customers while reducing operational costs and increasing operations efficiency through automation.”