According to Shepherd Tsomondo, production services manager of CABS, the company needed to maximise the uptime of its data centre, which houses all of its servers and related equipment for centralised real-time transactions processing for the whole country.

As a 24 x 7 processing centre, any downtime for CABS is unacceptable, be it caused by faults or scheduled maintenance. Should our systems fail, we could stand to lose billions of dollars per day, as our 300 sites would not be able to process transactions.

We were looking for a power supply system that could be repaired and serviced without having to be shut down for maintenance. According to our research, APC is the only company that offers such a solution. We approached APCs local global services partner, Tendo Electronics, who presented a value proposition that not only met our requirements but offered superior price/performance and technological sophistication.

APCs InfraStruXure is designed to incorporate all the components of Network-critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) - power, cooling, security and fire protection, cabling, as well as management and servicing - into a rack-optimised format. The solutions modular, on-demand architecture aims to allow companies to lower total cost of ownership, decrease downtime due to human error and maintain system resilience.

"Power remains a critical issue in Africa as most IT systems will crash if the supply is significantly interrupted," says Carl Kleynhans, country GM: Africa at APC. "At the same time, without sufficient cooling, IT equipment cannot maintain efficient operation for long. The consolidation of the data centre from room to row to rack has brought power and cooling issues to the fore.