The country's data storage capacity is set to get a boost as the Tier 4 data centre, which will be the first-of-its-kind in Asia and the sixth in the world, is expected to go live by June.

A Tier 4 data centre is the most robust of data centres and is designed to host the most mission critical computer systems, with fully redundant subsystems, the ability to continuously operate for an indefinite period of time during primary power outages.

Already 80 percent of the infrastructure of the state-of-the-art data centre has been set up and all the physical construction work will be wrapped up by March, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for ICT, told The Daily Star last week.

Once all construction work is done, the government will apply to Uptime Institute, the global authority of data centre best practices, for the final certification, Palak said. Uptime has already given the go-ahead to the design of the Tier 4 data centre.

“We will get the certificate within the next couple of months,” Palak added.

The Tier 4 centre, which will be built inside Bangabandhu Hi-Tech City at Kaliakoir in Gazipur at a cost of Tk 1,516.91 crore, will help in safeguarding digital contents and ensuring cyber security of the country.

In the absence of a dependable data centre in the country, businesses now fork out about Tk 10,000 crore a year to safeguard their data in mostly foreign shores.

Currently, there are only five Tier 4 data centres in the world: Madrid (Spain), Alcala de Henares (Spain), Las Vegas (US), Olathe (US) and Guelph (Canada).

The systems supported by the Tier 4 centre will remain available for use 99.995 percent of the times, up from 99.982 percent for a Tier 3 centre.

In other words, a Tier 4 data centre will have 0.8 hours of interruption every year, up from 1.6 hours for a Tier 3 centre.

Chinese vendor ZTE Corporation is developing the project. Senior officials of the project said the test run of the data centre will start in February or March this year.

Of the total cost, the government will provide Tk 317.55 crore and the rest will come from the Export-Import Bank of China as project assistance.