A cooling failure at a data center owned by NTT's South African subsidiary Dimension Data caused outages for customers on Tuesday 6 September.
Air conditioning systems failed around 04:25am, according to a report on My Broadband, with services interrupted for eight hours or more. My Broadband reports that row-end switches overheated and failed, so services were down until new switches could be delivered. In the meantime, according to a picture on My Broadband, portable air conditioning units were used.
Dimension Data has commented that only one customer was affected, and the onsite engineering team has resolved the failure within service level agreements (SLAs).
Not the new facility
Japan's NTT has owned Dimension Data since 2010, and in 2019, NTT announced plans to rebrand its data center operations worldwide, including e-shelter, RagingWire NetMagic, as NTT Global Data Centers. The established Dimension Data brand continues, selling IT services.
NTT is opening a new 12MW data center, JOH1, in CentralPoint Innovation Park, north of Johannesburg. Announced in 2020, JOH1 was due to open in April this year, but this has now been pushed back to October of this year - Dimension Data told DCD that the opening is planned for October.
Dimension Data confirmed to DCD that this cooling failure happened in a different "legacy" data center, run by Dimension Data subsidiary Internet Solutions, in Victory Park, closer to central Johannesburg. The facility is one of 11 data centers Dimension Data has on the African continent, including nine in South Africa.
