KenGen eyes data centre in revenue drive

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KenGen MD Rebecca Miano. FILE PHOTO | NMG

What you need to know:

  • The power producer is seeking a consultant of global stature to guide in the feasibility study, design and certification of commercial tier IV data centre.
  • The firm’s latest tender documents shows that the successful consultant will meet with the project stakeholders to pick on the location of the land and determine the requirements.

Kenya Electricity Generating Company #ticker:KENGEN (KenGen) plans to set up a commercial data centre for housing servers, network and storage systems of local and international firms at a fee in its latest revenue diversification push.

The power producer is seeking a consultant of global stature to guide in the feasibility study, design and certification of commercial tier IV data centre.

The firm’s latest tender documents shows that the successful consultant will meet with the project stakeholders to pick on the location of the land and determine the requirements.

“KenGen plans to build a new Tier IV Data Centre that can host mission critical systems and provide colocation, business continuity and managed services facilities to local and international organizations; as an additional and diversified revenue stream,” says the firm in tender documents.

Companies that store large volumes of data and rely on the integrity of the stored data for internal and external business processes will be among the targeted customers.

The project marks the latest bid by the firm to diversify its revenue streams away from the traditional business of producing electricity and selling to Kenya Power.

The consultant will be required to provide the complete design and technical specifications for the entire data centre including power, cooling, physical security, cabling, communication and fire protection civil works.

Mission critical systems are essential to the survival of a business or organisation and when they fail or suffer interruption, business operations are significantly impacted.

A tier IV data centre is an advanced computing and information storage facility with guaranteed availability time of 99.995 percent uptime time per year.

Companies with international reach and consistently high web traffic usually require tier IV facilities which are configured in a way that ensures no single outage or error can shut down the system.

The planned project comes at a time KenGen is setting up a geothermal drilling detergent manufacturing factory that will see it stop importing the commodity and make savings.

Other projects in the pipeline include commercial treatment and bottling of drinking water following commissioning of Gitaru Water Drinking Plant, and the KenGen Calibration Centre.

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