Datacraft and Indonesia’s Bank Central Asia (BCA) have entered into a multi-million dollar contract that will see the IT solutions and services company design, build and support a next-generation data centre infrastructure for the financial institution.
The project entails the design and construction of two new next-generation data centres in Jakarta with high-speed connectivity. The infrastructure will support a multitude of applications, ranging from heavy web-based applications, delay-sensitive voice conversations, SNA packets for networking, high-bandwidth storage replication and encrypted financial transactions.
"Datacraft will provide BCA with consulting services, engineering and staging services as well as a network disaster recovery plan. The new infrastructure will also be closely managed by Datacraft’s Uptime maintenance and support services to ensure fast response and quick resolution of any IT infrastructure problems," said Hendra Justiwan Tungadi, BCA's senior IT manager.
Datacraft Uptime service is highly flexible and can be tailored to meet the business needs as well as to support critical systems. In BCA’s case, this will be complemented by a high-speed dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) link between the data centres that will ensure five nines services availability.
"BCA has been engaging Datacraft for our Uptime services for seven years now. Our in-depth understanding of BCA’s day-to-day data centre operation and our ability to deliver have positioned us well in winning the project," said Patrap Yakin, Country Manager of Datacraft Indonesia.
A notable highlight of the new design is its use of virtualisation which means that instead of having and maintaining an individual hardware platform for each functional department, application, customer or partner, the infrastructure can be used to provide the same level of service for numerous user groups simultaneously, each with its dedicated resources and configurations.
"High availability is built in the design, eliminating single-points-of-failures ranging from power outages to module malfunctions, equipment failures, link disconnections or software patches/updates. The flexibility of the design also allows BCA to conduct a partial or full disaster recovery between the centres or run both data centres in active mode simultaneously," Yakin explained.
BCA will also enjoy two other major benefits – namely accurate accounting and manageability as well as built-in security.
By enabling in-band management, parameters such as performance, faults and inventory changes can be read from the network elements. Furthermore, with the introduction of out-of-band management, the network elements will still be accessible in the event of failures. Accounting and auditing trails are also in place to enable BCA to comply with standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II.
"End-to-end security is also put in place, extensively covering every point of vulnerability from user desktops to network access, link encryption, network perimeter security, one-time passwords, denial-of-service mitigation. This is backed by physical security solutions such as surveillance systems and door and equipment access," said Yakin.
The contract does not have any material impact on this financial year. |
