Launched on December 7 2011, MITA-01 is the new data centre of the Malta Information and Technology Agency, the government’s ICT agency, in Santa Venera. Works were carried out in just seven months at a cost of €7 million. The new data centre will support the two existing hosting data centres, one close to MITA’s head office in Blata l-Bajda and the other in Mater Dei hospital. MITA-01 is the only TIER III data centre in Malta, thus adhering to very high international standards. Additionally it is in line with the stringent Code of Conduct for Data Centres of the European Union (EU). Services that this centre will be catering for include e-ID, e-health, e-mail, internet browsing and web hosting, ARMS billing systems for water and electricity, VAT, Inland Revenue, Social Security and many other essential online and e-government services.
Though the data centre is hungry for electric power, the design keeps the electricity flow constant and the carbon footprint as small as possible. Two substations within the actual centre supply the energy whilst two generators serve as backup with an autonomy of 72 hours. Servers also have their own uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Photovoltaic panels of 20KW have also been installed on the centre’s roof, one of biggest installations of this kind in Malta.
A total of 7km of copper cabling and 8km of fibre cabling have been laid out in the data centre, which has 1,600 sqm of technical space for dedicated computer rooms. It can manage over 28,000 users, 450 terabytes of storage place and has the capability of managing 16,000 accounts handling a million e-mails every day. The server rooms are large enough to accommodate future expansion from 100 to 160 racks. The building is connected with the three main telecommunications companies in Malta through different routes and ducting.
The building extends itself over an area of 2,490m while the offices occupy 1,592m, which is more than half of the building space. There are large rooms to hold meetings and training seminars which were not available at Blata l-Bajda. MITA says its design was inspired from computer elements such as circuit boards and flow diagrams. The building is indeed one big computerised entity with a monitoring system to facilitate shutdowns of unnecessary use of equipment and systems. Access control is based on a biometrics and card combination. There is fire protection and suppression throughout all the centre and support facilities.