Hexion Storage Networks builds Africa’s largest All-NVMe SAN backbone with H3C
Hexion Storage Networks (www.hexion.co.za), Africa’s only six-data centre distributed All-NVMe data protection and storage platform, recently announced the completion of its state-of-the-art SAN (storage area network) backbone.
Built on a dedicated and fully meshed 40km dark-fibre ring and spanning six geo-redundant data centres within Cape Town, the backbone delivers sub-0.4ms roundtrip latency over 100Gbps links – scalable to 200Gbps – meeting the most stringent performance requirements for modern storage workloads.
“Low latency is non-negotiable for enterprise storage services,” said Zaid Bester, Chief Technology Officer at Hexion. “By leveraging H3C’s S6850 Datacentre Series switches, recently positioned as niche in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, and our purpose-built dark fibre infrastructure, we guarantee sub-0.4ms roundtrip latency across our meshed storage network, enabling Hexion’s All-NVMe clusters to deliver the fastest backup and recovery platform in Africa.”
Key highlights of the deployment include:
- A sub-0.4ms, 100Gbps-per-link SAN backbone fully meshed across a 40km dark-fibre ring within Cape Town offers exceptional throughput, path diversity and fault tolerance.
- Over 200km of access fibre infrastructure, enabling seamless connectivity to Hexion’s platform from major Cape Town POPs, including Teraco CT1 and CT2, NTT DC, Africa Data Center, OADC, V&A Waterfront, Century City, NAPAfrica CPT/JHB, Teraco Cloud Exchange and customer premises via dark-fibre or public internet using S3 endpoints.
- H3C S6850 Datacentre Series switches, delivering ultra-low latency switching, high-capacity forwarding and support for converged storage, data and network services.
- Fully meshed, geo-redundant architecture, with each storage node connected via multiple diverse fibre paths to ensure maximum uptime, data replication efficiency and seamless failover for primary, secondary and disaster recovery workloads.
- Enterprise-grade security, including XTS-AES 256-bit encryption, role-based access controls and strict multi-tenant isolation with dedicated private connectivity options for clients.
“Our partnership with H3C enables us to deliver uncompromised performance while maintaining cost-efficiency and scalability,” added Bester. “Customers gain secure, high-performance access to a fully redundant All-Flash, All-NVMe storage platform built for modern data challenges.”
