Etisalat, UAE-based telecommunications services provider, is building two additional data centers— Jebel Ali and Al Ain. Jebel Ali is located on the southern outskirts of Dubai, and Al Ain is a city situated on the UAE’s eastern border with Oman. The telecommunications giant is stepping up to meet the growing demand of digital transformation in the UAE.
According to the TechRadar Middle East report, the Jebel Ali campus is expected to be the biggest data center in the UAE. With an area of about 4,000 square meters of white space, the campus is capable of addressing the needs of the customers for the next five years. It will be divided into eight different data halls, while the density of the data centers will be 6.5 kiloWatt per rack. The Jebel Ali campus, Etisalat’s 12th data center in the country, will be online by the third quarter of 2020. The facility will have an initial capacity of 12.4 MW of IT power.
The TechRadar Middle East report says that Al Ain campus would be up and running in the third quarter of this year. “The Al Ain campus will have an area of 1,700 square meters. It will be in four rooms and on two floors. The overall IT power will be 4MW while the average density per rack will be 6kW,” Miguel Angel Villalonga, vice-president for cloud and data center at Etisalat Digital told TechRadar Middle East.
Etisalat’s latest move is also a preparation for the upcoming Expo 2020. It is believed that the demand for cloud services will be huge in the coming years. Being the official telecom provider of Expo 2020, Etisalat is leaving no stone unturned to ramp up its infrastructure. The telecom firm boasts of 10 commercial data centers in the country. It also has plans to retire some of the older data centers and move customers to the new campus in the next two years.
UAE has now become an area of interest for big tech companies. Amazon Web Services has data centers in Bahrain and the UAE. Microsoft opened its first data center regions in the Middle East last month. Oracle and Alibaba Cloud have also invested in the UAE.
