NIC rolls out Rs 2bn data centre at Bhubaneswar, its fourth in the country

The new state-of-the-art cloud enabled national centre has 275 racks and can host 35,000 virtual servers

The National Informatics Centre (NIC), the IT backbone of Government of India, today launched its fourth national data centre in the country at Bhubaneswar here.

The new state-of-the-art cloud-enabled national centre, inaugurated by the Union minister for electronics and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad, is an addition to the ones at Delhi, Pune and Hyderabad.

Built at a cost of about Rs two billion, it has about 275 racks and can host 35,000 virtual servers.

"Governments, both centre and the state, district and panchayats can host their websites at the new cloud based data centre. Once, the capacity reaches 40 per cent we will plan for another one. Select PSUs can also host projects here", said Neeta Verma, director General of NIC said.

The new centre is spread over 40,000 square feet area.

NIC provides technology support to all governance services and hosts nearly 10,000 websites of the government.

"NDC is designed with state of the art knowhow keeping in mind the future technologies and departments in mind. Data centre is also designed to be flexible to be able to cater to simple hosting to most complex requirement of the government", she added.

The new data centre at Bhubaneswar unit aims to offer round-the-clock operations with secure hosting for e-governance applications of ministries and department.

An NIC statement said that the unified and shared infrastructure is flexible enough to rapidly respond to infrastructure requirements and also accommodate future technology enhancements, distributed applications, database applications, virtualised applications and cloud-based applications that are available on demand.

The cloud services will provide benefits like on-demand access to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructure for easy availability and quick deployment of applications and standardised platforms of deployment to deliver ICT services.

Stating the establishment of data centre as a red letter day for Bhubaneswar , the Union minister said, the centre is of global standard.

The cloud service offerings of NIC would allow departments to provision infrastructure and add to the computing capacity "on demand".