The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for operating retail payments and settlement systems in the country, will develop its smart data centre in Hyderabad at an investment of Rs 500 crore.
Telangana's Minister for Industry and Information Technology K T Rama Rao, on Thursday laid the foundation stone of the smart data centre that would be recognised as the first Tier IV data centre in Hyderabad.
The facility, to be built as per the international standards, will house the national critical set-up with highly secured infrastructure. It will host major services under the Digital India initiatives.
The smart data centre would be located at Narsingi village in Ranga Reddy district. With this data centre, Hyderabad will be one of the major hubs for processing payments with a value of almost Rs 15 lakh crore per month and transactions of about 14,000 million per month, according to a statement from the minister's office.
The NPCI has chosen Telangana to set up the facility as it is one of the strategic and fastest growing IT corridors in the country with advantage of supportive geographical presence, availability of abundant human resources and best in class network and infrastructure and extraordinary support from the state government. This will add to Telangana’s brand equity in attracting investments in the Information & Communication Technology (ICT) sector, it said.
The proposed smart data centre would ensure high availability up to 99.995% and complied with full redundant infrastructure (N+N) even during natural calamities like earthquakes, cyclones etc. and have modular design for higher sustainability.
It is going to be environment friendly with the adoption of green building features, rainwater harvesting and solar panels. The centre is being built with an Internet of Things (IoT) based building management system that will have eight layers of security. NPCI has engaged Larsen & Toubro (L&T) as its turnkey contractor for building the centre.
NPCI MD & CEO, Dilip Asbe said their focus will always remain on enhancing acceptance infrastructure for digital payments so as to encourage customers towards digital transactions to achieve RBI and government's less cash objective. He said with the smart data centre, they were happy to create more employment opportunities as well.