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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 16/Jul/19 16:33, Ken Gilmour wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">Hi Folks,
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<div>I work for a Security Analytics org and we're looking to
build a small POP in Africa.</div>
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Where, in Africa? It's not a small place...<br>
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<li>Network needs to be able to receive millions of small
PPS (as opposed to serving smaller numbers of larger
files).</li>
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Depending on where in Africa you want to deploy, there will be a
choice of service providers.<br>
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<li>Can't be cloud (need bare metal servers / colo). We use
the full capacity of each server, all the time.</li>
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This is possible, but will depend on where, in Africa, you want to
deploy.<br>
<br>
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<li>Must have good connectivity to most of the rest of
Africa</li>
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This is a tricky one, but if you know where you want to be, it will
help to give you options.<br>
<br>
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<li>We can initially only have one POP</li>
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Not a problem, but where?<br>
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<div>This is not like a normal website that we can just host
on "any old provider", the requirements are very different.</div>
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<div>Is there a good location where we could either rent bare
metal servers (something like Internap - preferred) or
colocate servers within Africa that can serve most of the
region?</div>
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Africa is huge, with varying levels of quality of connectivity. The
3 main regions are East Africa (Kenya leading), Southern Africa
(South Africa leading) and West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana leading).<br>
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For North Africa, your options can swing between Egypt and Morocco.
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But stringing all of these locations together, particularly West and
North to East and South, will not be straight forward.<br>
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<div>"Good" is defined as an area with stable connectivity and
power, no legal restrictions on things like encryption, and
good latency (sub 100ms) to the rest of Africa.</div>
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Yes, all 5 will be difficult at this point in time.<br>
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For most of that, hosting within Eastern and Southern Africa will be
your best bets.<br>
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West Africa ticks a lot of the boxes, but it's not very straight
forward when it comes to co-lo.<br>
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<div>Our two closest POPs are in Singapore and The Netherlands,
so I'd like something closer to the middle that can serve the
rest of Africa. Middle East will be deployed after Africa.</div>
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Singapore is closer to Eastern & Southern Africa. Will be too
far to West Africa unless you want to switch in Europe.<br>
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The Netherlands is okay for all of Africa.<br>
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The Middle East is closer to Eastern Africa. Too far for West Africa
unless you want to switch in Europe.<br>
<br>
Mark.<br>
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