Port Louis & London, 14 September 2009 – An international conference and exhibition taking place in Mauritius (www.datacentres.com/dcsmi) at the end of this month will profile a new sea water cooling system for data centres. The conference which has as it patron the Board of Investment Mauritius, is bringing together enterprise CIOs, IT Directors and Data Centre Owners and Investors from overseas, to promote the island as a new opportunity for secure data centre disaster recovery and an advantageous location for building new facilities.

The unique conference will showcase the Mauritius Eco-Park project and the competitive advantages it offers as a location for disaster recovery, outsourcing, investing and building green data centre facilities.

In addition the conference will profile new sea water cooling techniques for data centres. At a time when data centres confront the global challenge of power and cooling, the Mauritius Eco-Park project, will aim to exploit the position of the island on the path of a deep sea current, through technologies and processes that are sustainable and environmentally friendly. The temperature of deep water samples beyond 1000m is about 5 degrees centigrade at 1000 m below sea level about 4,900 m from the shore. This temperature profile enables the project to gear-up to the concept of seawater air-conditioning (SWAC). SWAC has actually been used in several locations including Hawaii and Curacao

APC by Schneider Electric is the platinum sponsor of the conference and will be represented by Carl Kleynhans, Regional Director, Africa, Indian Ocean Islands & South Caribbean in the programme. The expert speakers specially attending the event also include Jonathan Atkin, Managing Director, RBC Capital Markets; Guy Willner, co-founder IXEurope and now a board member of South African carrier neutral data centre operator, Teraco; Simon Lee, Managing Director of Sapience Capital Partners; Te- Shan Gan, Group CEO of The AIMS Asia Group, owned by Megawisra; Andrew Jay, Senior Director of international property specialists, CB Richard Ellis; Dr Ian Bitterlin, CTO of Prism Power; Bernard Lecanu, EU Commission Green IT Group; Anstophie Strydom, General Manager Business Development, Continuity SA; Amit Abhyankar, Associate Vice President, Omnitech; Ntini Shan, Chairman & Managing Director, Allied Digital Ltd; Vivek Gupta, CEO, Zamil Industrial, Mr. Gallagher CEO of Fortress USA and Mohan Abichandani of Reliance ADA Communications.

“Mauritius is ideally positioned at the crossroads of Africa, Asia and Australia and outside major earthquake ridges,” commented Philip Low, managing director at BroadGroup. “The island is also well known as a major financial and infocom hub. Being relatively remote but well-connected to the world is a major attribute for the island-nation to position itself as a disaster recovery and business continuity destination.”

In this context, Mauritius will host the Internet Data Centre Conference which will take place September 30 – October 1 2009, to connect local operators with potential partners. The event will also act as a showcase to position Mauritius as the next emerging data hosting and business continuity destination, which is increasingly recognized as a bilingual, high-quality destination with cost per seat comparable with India, Philippines and Egypt.