NPCI is expanding its wings – Tier IV Data Centre in Hyderabad

          The chief driving force behind Safe Digital Transactions in India – National Payments Corporation of India is expanding its physical presence.

          As on date, NPCI has its offices in Mumbai,Chennai and Delhi. In Mumbai, its offices are located in Bandra Kurla Office and Goregaon.

          As the number of Digital transactions routed through NPCI Network is on the increase, NPCI has decided to expand it physical presence to Hyderabad too.

          It has released an Expression of Interest (EOI) to develop NPCI’s Integrated Office Building and Data Centre (IODC).

          The  Tier IV Data Centre and Integrated Office Building will be on approximately 3.5 to 4 acres of land at Gachibowli, Hyderabad.

          Highlights of Tier IV Data Centre:

·       The highest level of guarantee that a data center can provide, with 99.99% availability.

·       This data center category is fully redundant in terms of electrical circuits, cooling and network.

·       This architecture can withstand even the most serious of technical incidents without server availability ever being affected.

·       In T4, the server doubles the power supply in direct connections, has 2 processors, authorizes hot-swap disk changes

Q: What is Hot-swap focus:

          Ans: The major advantage of this feature is being able to upgrade a disk or replace a faulty component (RAID disk, power supply) without any service interruption on the server.

          Basically Data Centres can be classified into 4 types.

§  Tier 1 = Non-redundant capacity components (single uplink and servers).  Guaranteeing 99.671% availability.

§  Tier 2 = Tier 1 + Redundant capacity components. Guaranteeing 99.741% availability.

§  Tier 3 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Dual-powered equipments and multiple uplinks. Guaranteeing 99.741% availability. Guaranteeing 99.982% availability.

§  Tier 4 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Tier 3 + all components are fully fault-tolerant including uplinks, storage, chillers, HVAC systems, servers etc. Everything is dual-powered. Guaranteeing 99.995% availability.

Tier 4 data center considered as most robust and less prone to failures. Tier 4 is designed to host mission critical servers and computer systems, with fully redundant subsystems (cooling, power, network links, storage etc) and compartmentalized security zones controlled by biometric access controls methods. Naturally, the simplest is a Tier 1 data center used by small business or shops.