Tier 4 data centre a step closer to reality

The global regulator has given the go-ahead to the design of Bangladesh's first Tier 4 national data centre, which will boost the country's data storage capacity.

Uptime Institute, global authority of data centre best practices, examined the design document, constructed facility and operational sustainability of the centre and gave certificate to Bangladesh, the ICT division said in a statement yesterday.

The data centre will help in safeguarding digital contents and ensuring cyber security of the country, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for ICT, said after getting the certificate. At present, Bangladesh has a Tier 3 data centre, which is inadequate to meet the country's demand, experts said.

The Tier 4 centre, which will be built inside Bangabandhu Hi-Tech City at Kaliakoir in Gazipur at a cost of Tk 1,516.91 crore, will be the first-of-its-kind in Asia and the sixth in the world.

Up to 70 percent of the work for the establishment of the centre is complete and the government has also imported server, networking and other equipment, storage capacity, power, cooling, fire systems for the centre.

The systems that will be supported by the Tier 4 data centre, which will be up and running by June 2018, will remain available 99.995 percent of the times, up from 99.982 percent for a Tier 3 centre.

In other words, a Tier 4 data centre will have 0.8 hours of interruption every year, up from 1.6 hours for a Tier 3 centre.

Chinese vendor ZTE Corporation is developing the project.

For the data centre, the government will provide Tk 317.55 crore and the rest will come from the Export-Import Bank of China as project assistance.

Currently, there are five Tier 4 data centres in the world. They are located in Madrid (Spain), Alcala de Henares (Spain), Las Vegas (USA), Olathe (USA) and Guelph (Canada).