BitDepth#1409
MARK LYNDERSAY
IN MARCH, the Government, through iGovTT, invited tenders for a proposed Tier 4 data centre facility at Phoenix Park Industrial Estate.
TT has at least five working data centres.
Getting a response to questions on the matter took more than a month, as the query was bounced from iGovTT to the Ministry of Digital Transformation.
The formal statement, in an e-mail signed by Kemba Moses-Henry, business operations assistant II of the ministry's Engagement and Behavioural Communications Unit, stated, "This data centre is required to service the immediate requirements for current digital transformation programmes and projects, and to support the long-term digitalisation vision for significantly enhanced resiliency and security for all government digital solutions."
Why is it necessary to build another facility from scratch? Why not colocate government servers in existing facilities pending an upgrade of those facilities to Tier 4 status?
"GoRTT's digital transformation agenda is highly focused on services to citizens and the proper management and handling of GoRTT and user data. As such, there is the conviction that the need for GoRTT to own and manage its own data centre and associated technology to support those use-cases with highly sensitive or confidential datasets."
One of the specifications that separates Tier 3 status from Tier 4 is the provision of electricity from two different suppliers. TT has only one, TTEC, and changing that requires an act of Parliament.
The prospectus for the ministry project includes a solar park capable of producing 500 kilowatts of electricity. Will the Government generate its own electricity for the facility in defiance of law?
A caveat in the published prospectus for the proposed data centre notes that the project must have "at a minimum Tier 3 certification at the point of commissioning if the elements for Tier 4 are not available within the timeline specified."
Acknowledging the importance of the Government retaining substantive control of sensitive national data, TSTT noted in a response to questions that it has the only data centre in the Caribbean and Latin America with both TIA 942-B Rated 3 certification for infrastructure and DCOS maturity level 3 for operations.
Other data centre facilities run by Flow, AirLink and Fujitsu function at a minimum of Tier 2. Digicel announced plans for a Tier 3 facility in 2015 (https://bit.ly/3q9j1pp).
Data centre certifications are a swamp land of acronyms, but the critical difference between Tier 3 and Tier 4 comes down to redundancy and uptime.
The strategic deployment of duplicate power sources, components and cooling systems raise the reliability of a data centre from 99.982 per cent availability at Tier 3 to 99.995 availability at Tier 4.
That's the difference between service recovery times of 1.6 hours and 26.3 minutes annually.
Tier 4 facilities have no single point of failure. The specification requires a duplicate, active version of every component in the data ce
