Data centre and critical infrastructure power systems manufacturer Master Power Technologies (MPT) has opened a customer experience centre at its offices in Midrand, Gauteng, where customers can test and validate solutions before installing them into their data centres.

Power and cooling were critical components in the digital sector and the new centre was a platform to choose equipment, as well as evaluate and validate the characteristics of equipment, MPT founder and CEO Menno Parsons said on June 22 at the launch of the centre.

The experience centre showcases the company's equipment and also provides training on various power, monitoring, management and cooling systems that are used in data centres.

“With the centre, we can demonstrate what a cooling solution, for example, is able to do, and provide a hands-on experience of how equipment works, validating the capabilities of the equipment that will be foundational to operations,” he said.

The R50-million centre will mainly serve the company's customers in Africa, and help them to design the digital infrastructure needed by the digital economy and which is suited to their environments, supply chains and needs.

Founded in 1999, MPT operates in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Parsons emphasised that the digital sector changed rapidly and companies needed to not only be agile, but also increasingly be able to deliver new infrastructure more rapidly.

“The details of how this can be achieved is the engineering design. Time to market is more important than ever before, and experiencing a problem in a live environment is too late. The centre is about verifying the performance of a piece of equipment or an integrated system or solution,” he said.

“The world depends on reliable data centres, and the systems that power and protect them, and ensure they operate, are essential to modern society. The experience centre was established to test systems, learn and gain confidence in solutions before they are placed into critical environments,” added retired MPT sales and marketing manager Neill Schreiber.

Parsons noted, as background, that Schreiber had in 2009 launched a test centre to validate high-power uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and also established a cooling testing centre, after the company experienced challenges with cooling systems.

“MPT started in a small house in Randburg, in Gauteng, doing mainly UPS, but we have since become a significant company in the digital space with almost 600 employees. We are an Africa-based business that is competing against multinationals.

Indeed, MPT has been certified according to the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency. The code comprises about 160 best practices to run data centres efficiently.

Energy is a major component of data centre operations and a significant source of their operating costs, said BL International Consulting MD and one of the original architects of the EU code Bernard Lecanu.

Data centre company Digital Parks Africa - a long-term customer of MPT - had been certified according to the EU code, said Digital Parks-affiliated independent IT consulting company Acton Consulting director Mark Acton.

He added that a working group was developing a similar code to the EU's, for Africa, which should be finalised within the next year, but that local companies were using the EU version of the code currently.

“Digital Parks Africa had one of the best data centres I have audited, and it has the same level of international data centre technology as other data centres certified according to the code,” enthused Lecanu.

“We are building ecosystems alongside our clients and look forward to growing further in the digital space,” concluded Parsons.