According to SeaCom, which provides telecommunications to businesses across the African continent from undersea cables to an extensive fibre grid, South Africa is experiencing a data centre boom, and this growth in data centres is, in turn, good for the economy. This is because local data facilities enhance internet speeds and processing power for South African businesses, which logically has a positive effect on competitiveness. However, data centres are costly, so choosing the best transceivers available is crucial for the network, while also assisting with an organisation's budget.

Brent Wood, the Vendor Alliance Manager for South Africa at Exclusive Networks Africa, explains: "Simply put, data centres provide the compute power to run applications, the storage capabilities to process data, and the networking to connect employees with the resources needed to do their jobs."

ProLabs, a leading global provider of optical networking solutions, delivers optical connectivity solutions across a diverse range of industries. It supplies solutions for data centres and service providers that are completely compatible in form and functionality across 100 OEM manufacturers, covering more than 20,000 systems and platforms.

ProLabs solutions are distributed throughout Sub-Saharan Africa by Exclusive Networks Africa, the continental arm of this global trusted cybersecurity specialist for digital infrastructure.

To avoid excessive module costs, ProLabs offers advice on designing an ideal data centre transceiver configuration:

100 percent compatibility is key: Whether compatible or OEM modules, both must be able to communicate seamlessly and instantly within the network. ProLabs codes and tests 100 percent of its optics to the exact specifications of original devices in real switches and routers, rather than by emulation or batch testing. In this way, it is able to certify its transceivers as being fully interoperable with the OEM switches - a vital component to guarantee success.

Reduced power consumption for lower operating costs: In addition to cost, it is important to consider the energy efficiency of transceivers. Power consumption may only differ by a few tenths of a watt per unit, but this difference accumulates daily to an exponential difference in daily operating costs. Today's data centres aim to operate with efficiency metrics between 40 percent and 70 percent of the critical load. This means that for every 1 watt of IT critical load used, an additional 0.4W to 0.7W of support load is used to cool and maintain the data centre. Given these data centre economics, reducing the IT load by 1 watt means reducing to total power load by 1.4 to 1.7 watts, which compounds into significant savings over time. Through lower power consumption optics, data centre managers can minimise operating costs and its impact on OPEX and CAPEX.

Save space with higher density optics: One of the top considerations that IT architects have when building a data centre is its use of space. Fibre optic transceivers with smaller form factors can provide optimised space-saving solutions for a high-density data centre.

"The overhead costs involved in owning and running a data centre are high," advises Wood, "and these include facilities, server technology and its related hardware and software, as well as networking and bandwidth costs, and hiring the engineers and technical staff to perform the IT operations role.

"ProLabs OEM compatible optics provide the benefits without compromise, with up to 70 percent savings gained through helping to reduce data centre power consumption, to saving space with high quality modules."