Nigeria’s Galaxy Backbone (GBB) Tier 4 Centre in Kano, Kano State, North-West is set for launch as it would deepen the national digital infrastructure experience in the country.
Designed to improve the total customer experience of GBB’s growing list of clients from the public and private sectors, the new digital infrastructure in Kano will serve as a backup to the Tier III data centre in Abuja,
All Tier 4 data centres add fault tolerance mechanisms to the tier 3 list of requirements.
Multiple physically isolated systems act as redundant components and distribution paths. Besides all the Tier 3 conditions, a Tier 4 facility must ensure:
All components have the support of two generators, two UPS systems, and two cooling systems.
Each distribution path is independent so that a single failure in one does not cause a domino effect with other components.
Operations continue to run for a minimum of 96 hours following a local or regional power outage.
The power source does not connect to any external source.
The separation between redundant components is vital for a tier 4 data centre. Physical separation prevents a local event from compromising both systems.
Tier 4 data centres have 2N or 2N+1 redundancy: 2N redundancy (or N+N) means the facility has a wholly mirrored, independent system on stand-by. If anything happens to a primary component, an identical backup replica starts operating to ensure continued operations.
The 2N+1 model provides twice the operational capacity (2N) and an additional backup component (+1) in case a failure happens while a secondary system is active.
The GBB’s Tier 4 facility can ensure clients do not experience more than 26.3 minutes of downtime annually. In addition, customers are guaranteed a Tier 4 service level agreement (SLAs) that is near 100% uptime even in the face of required maintenance of redundant counterparts.
According to Managing Director, Professor Muhammed Abubakar, Galaxy will continuously invest in enhancing digital infrastructure and human capacity to meet the rising and sophisticated demands across agencies including security and other arms of governments.
The vendor-neutral facility is benchmarked on performance-based standards in terms of availability, redundancy, and fault tolerance.
Nigeria’s Galaxy Backbone is the network communications and data hosting infrastructure platform for federal ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) as well as private sector organisations
With more than 800 MDAs in existence, the GBB has routinely faced the challenge of helping MDAs improve they’re too achieve their statutory mandate.
The new Kano facility is part of the overall plan to provide functional data centres in all the six geopolitical zones of the country.
Dominica Nwabufo
