Investing in the IT future

Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) has invested €7 million in a new corporate data centre called MITA-01.

The construction of MITA-01 was ­primarily driven by the need to provide a cost-effective hosting environment, sufficiently scalable, secure and resilient to meet the government’s long-term information systems requirements.

The government, through MITA, was already operating two corporate data centres – one in Blata l-Bajda and one at Mater Dei Hospital.

Combined, these centres hosted approximately 700 physical and virtual servers.

In 2008, it became evident that these would be reaching full capacity within a few years and the increasing pace of take-up as well as medium to long term demand indicated the need for a strategic investment in this area. After discussions, a government-owned site in St Venera was allocated to MITA early in 2010.

A set of five key design principles were established to guide the project.

MITA-01 is scalable to support future growth plans and new technologies.

It includes modular, independent and segmented computer rooms which ensure operational flexibility and adheres to TIER III specification.

MITA-01 also has multi-tier data centre zoning and is designed to be effective and efficient in its energy use, keeping in line with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres.

MITA-01 offers 1,600 square metres of technical space assigned solely to computer rooms.

It currently hosts 100 cabinets for servers, with additional space available.

To maintain electrical power, the building has two in-house 1.6 MW substations and two on-site backup generators with the capacity of 1 MW each, providing MITA-01 with an operating autonomy of 72 hours.

In order to sustain an optimum operational temperature, MITA-01 has closed control air-conditioning units controlling temperature in the computer rooms on a 24/7 basis.

MITA-01 has a building monitoring system that automatically shuts down equipment at times of low load, as well as a comprehensive energy monitoring system.

The centre also has a 20kW photovoltaic plant and solar water heating systems on its roof.

So far this project has attained international accreditation from the Uptime Institute for a TIER III data centre design. Having this TIER III status, the facility is certified as designed to meet 99.98 per cent of availability targets, a maximum of 1.6 hours of unscheduled annual downtime and not more than one failure every two-and-a-half years. MITA-01 is the only Tier III data centre in the region.

MITA-01 includes a number of offices which accommodate approximately 70 technical staff from various departments, including the Networks Operations Centre and the Service Call Centre.