Bangladesh government has initiated the long-term planning to realize the technology-driven governance system alongside of ease citizen services.
In the last one decade, the ‘Digital Bangladesh’ programme backed the country’s significant growth in different indicators of connectivity and other infrastructure related to ‘smart government system’.
In this journey of digital transformation, our population is rapidly going digital and the continued internet penetration is enabling the opportunity nationwide to explore the benefits of internet.
Following the surge in demand for data, nothing is more crucial than the data center. At the core, data centers are large physical facilities that house data processing computers. Data centers are critical to job creation and innovation in the modern economy.
Bangladesh has a Tier III data center but the capacity of this data center is already full. Thus, a IV Tier national Data Center has been established at the ‘High Tech Park’ in Kaliakoir, Gazipur by Chinese tech giant Zhong Xing Telecommunication Equipment(ZTE) Corporation. This Data center capacity will be two petabytes.
Bangladesh data centre was built at a cost of Tk 1,516.91 crore, with a capacity of two petabytes. One petabyte is equivalent to 10 lakh gigabytes.
ZTE Corporation Bangladesh Chief Executive Officer Vincent Liu said the new national data center is very important for preserving, securing and sharing the data and for many things to be user-friendly.
According to the global standard of a Tier 4 data centre, it will remain available 99.995 percent of the time, up from 99.982 percent in case of a Tier 3 centre.
In other words, a Tier 4 data centre will have 0.8 hours of interruption a year, which is half of the disruption faced by a Tier 3 centre.
For the data centre, the government is providing Tk 317.55 crore while the rest is coming from the Export-Import Bank of China as project assistance.
There are three Tier 4 data centres in the US, two in Spain and one each in Saudi Arabia and Canada.
One petabyte is equivalent to 10 lakh gigabytes. Uptime Institute’s Tier IV certified national data center of Bangladesh is the highest level of availability, performance and resilience that a data center can achieve, designed to support mission critical operations.
It is the first ever national data center that received both the UpTime Tier IV design certification and facility certification in the country, and is also the first data center in South Asia that got UPTIME Tier IV facility certification.
Regarding the initiative, ZTE Corporation Bangladesh government enterprise Managing Director Chen Wei said the Bangladesh government of is committed to the growth of information and communication technology sector and they already have taken different initiatives to boost this sector.
“With the national data center as one of the effective initiatives, It’s expected to have a massive impact on economy and ICT sector of Bangladesh’, added Chen.
This Tier IV Data Center is fault tolerant, which means that when an individual piece of equipment fails or a distribution path interruption occurs, the effects of the event are stopped short and prevented from ever impacting critical IT operations.
Operations are fine-tuned to ensure effective and seamless maintenance, operations and response to any fault.
In this complete turnkey project, ZTE is fully responsible for the civil construction of the park and buildings, data center physical infrastructure (DCPI), IT software and hardware, and O&M services.
As the main body of this project, the DCPI was designed and constructed strictly in accordance with the Uptime Institute Tier IV standard, and a reliability level of 99.995 percent is going to be reached.
The data center has the most-advanced shock-proof, flood-proof, and explosion-proof design to ensure its safety and reliability. The successful project implementation underlines the technical strength of ZTE world’s leading products.
ZTE is a provider of advanced telecommunications systems, mobile devices, and enterprise technology solutions to consumers, carriers, companies and public sector customers.
The company is committed to providing customers with integrated end-to-end innovations to deliver excellence and value as the telecommunications and information technology sectors converge. ZTE sells its products and services in more than 160 countries.
To date, ZTE has obtained 25 commercial fifth generation service contracts in major 5G markets such as Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, etc.
Jannatul Islam is with Daily Sun. He an be reached over email at [email protected]
