More than 30 representatives from 20 countries, members of the ACE Submarine Cable Steering Committee, visit the facilities in Granadilla de Abona to learn about and replicate its operation in their countries of origin.
The data center, together with the activity developed by the Cabildo de Tenerife, through Canalink, an ITER company, for the deployment of submarine cable, make the Canary Islands a strategic territory for intercontinental connectivity.
The Management Committee of the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) Submarine Cable Consortium, of which the company Canalinkmet this week in the south of the island to discuss the future of intercontinental connectivity. The group of experts visited the company’s facilities in the D-Alix center, a state-of-the-art data center belonging to the Cabildo de Tenerife through the Instituto Tecnológico de Energías Renovables (ITER), to learn about and replicate its operation in their countries of origin.
The ACE cable is one of the main cables in Africa, with an extension of more than 17,000 km, connecting 23 countries, being in some cases the first and only cable connecting with some of these countries on the west coast of Africa, such as Mauritania, Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone or Gambia, among others.
During the visit, the members of the Management Committee of the ACE cable consortium, led by the president of the consortium and accompanied by the CEO and technicians of Canalink, have known the singularities of this data center, with unique features and whose facilities are designed to continue to grow and accommodate new projects from a modular system.
According to Canalink’s international account executive, Zakariaa Edouieb, “The network we have been developing over the years is key to global connectivity. The Canary Islands is strategically located in the Atlantic and its proximity to Africa means that Canalink and its technological support is being taken into account by large companies that need to have these submarine highways to distribute their data efficiently”.
A key infrastructure for connectivity and the development of innovative projects
The D-Alix data storage center houses the Teide HPC (High Performance Computing) supercomputer. This infrastructure allows high-speed information processing for the development of projects in areas such as artificial intelligence or scientific research that require big data computing.
In addition to the capacity of the data center , Canalink’s activity in the deployment of submarine cables places Tenerife as a strategic territory in international connectivity. In addition to participating in the ACE cable, Canalink, and therefore the Canary Islands, is connected to the WACS cable (West Africa Cable System), another international cable that connects multiple countries on the West African coast. These agreements allow the Tenerife-based company to connect the countries of the West African coast with European points such as Madrid, London, Paris or Milan, among others.
A recent example of the strategic commitment of the Cabildo de Tenerife, through Canalink, to improve its network capacity in the Archipelago is its participation in the 2Africa project, which, sponsored by Vodafone among others, aims to deploy a submarine cable 45,000 kilometers long that will connect a third of the world’s population in 33 countries. The mooring maneuver was carried out this week on the beach of Las Salinetas, in the Gran Canarian municipality of Telde.
