First Phase of new National Data Centre almost complete

Work on the first phase of the new Tier 3 National Data Centre for Ghana would soon be completed to provide a 160-rack space capacity to host public and private sector data.

The Data Centre, which is being built by Huawei Technologies of China at a cost of $30 million in the first phase, would also have a power capacity of two 2000KVA each generator.

The project is being financed by a loan from China’s EXIM Bank, briefing journalists on a visit to the site, Mr Senah Ocloo-Sewor, Data Centre Engineer with the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), said the new Data Centre would have more than enough capacity to support Ghana’s advancement in technology.

The media tour of Chinese funded or executed projects in Ghana is prior to the celebration of the 55th anniversary of bilateral relations between the two countries.

He said although the current data centre is able to handle the available data, it lacked the capacity to meet the country’s future needs.

Besides, the current data centre had only one main source to receive power from the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and two 800KVA generators and also lack space for any expansion.

Mr Ocloo-Sewor said the Data Centre would provide various IT services to clients from both the public and private sector, including internet services, data storage facilities, web hosting as well as anti-virus security among others.

“We currently have installed four modules of 44 racks each. People can come and rent rack space and store their equipment, like servers and databases in the racks. We will add more racks in the second phase to further increase its capacity,” he stated.

He said in order to ensure service reliability and security, the Centre is designed to ensure redundancy, in terms of the support infrastructure installed at the centre.

This applies to the power supply to the centre, cooling systems, network installations as well as the firewalls and intrusion prevention systems.

Huawei Technologies, as the main contractor, is in charge of providing the installations for the entire infrastructure and the support infrastructure, including the IDS 2002 Data Center modules, installation in terms of cabling, actual physical rack installation and Television screens for the Data Centre Control Room.

“Internationally it is a very competitive technology they are providing us. A lot of companies are switching from whichever brand they might be using to Huawei. It tends to be a lot cheaper to obtain than other brands, while achieving the same standards,” Mr. Ocloo-Sewor noted.

He said the completion of the Data Centre would put Ghana in a position to provide services to clients even in the West African sub-region.