As work on the €7.3 million new government data centre in Santa Venera is nearing completion, the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) has just carried out an extensive design exercise to provide a scalable and modular data cabling infrastructure aimed at offering high bandwidth connectivity services. As a result of the exercise, over 72 km of copper cabling and 6.5 km of fibre optic cabling are being installed to cater for 100 communication cabinets.
The data centre will house up to 60 technical staff and will cater for government’s current and future connectivity requirements. The data cabling infrastructure will serve as the bloodline for all the networking and server communications, and the installation is being carried by Tenovar, following a public call for tenders. The internal data cabling has been channelled via overhead cable baskets and appropriately routed via diverse paths to offer redundancy at cabling level.
In addition to the internal data cabling, MITA has also commissioned Vodafone and Melita for a direct fibre connection to the respective network infrastructures for wide range of data communication services, while Go has been commissioned for the provision of dark fibre infrastructure between its corporate data centres and MAGNET (Malta Government Network) connectivity. The completion of the data cabling infrastructure, including testing and commissioning, is being finalised right now, while the new state-of the art ICT centre is set to open its doors in November.
This investment is primarily driven by the additional hosting space required for the broad portfolio of new ICT initiatives which government intends to roll-out in the near future, such as the new e-government platform, e-learning, e-health and the new e-ID cards.
The new data centre, which caters for the demands expected over the next 10 years, will also provide the additional hosting space required by the multitude of new ICT initiatives highlighted in the MITA Strategic Plan.
The new data centre in Santa Venera will have a footprint of 2,490 m2 whilst a further 1,592 m2 will be dedicated for office space. Power is supplied through two in-house substations and backed by uninterrupted power supply systems and standby generators.
The design of the new corporate data centre has been assured through accreditation to the Tier 3 Design Certification by the Uptime Institute, which certifies data centres against a tier classification system. It is also in line with the provisions set out for participation in the EU code of conduct for data centres and in line with ISO 27001 information security standards. The government, through MITA, is already operating two corporate data centres. In recent years the agency carried out an extensive exercise to rationalise and consolidate government’s hosting services into these two corporate data centres reaping the benefits arising from reduced total cost of ownership and significantly improved management. In this exercise, critical applications have been deployed on an “active–active” geo-clustered consolidated infrastructure to guarantee optimum uptime.
These two operational data centres host approximately 700 physical and virtualised servers, with 84 per cent of space taken up and the rest will be fully allocated by the end of 2011.