Today is March 20, 2010

New State Data Center

The Mississippi Legislature in conjunction with the Department of Finance Administration, Bureau of Buildings has approved and funded the construction of a new Data Center for the Department of Information Technology Services. The new Data Center will be a state of the art facility and is expected to be completed by the end of 2009.

The new Data Center will provide functionality exceeding those of the present Data Center. The Data Center will be:

• Hardened to provide protection against most natural and man-made disasters.
• Constructed to provide complete redundancy in all electrical and mechanical systems.
• More physically secure.
• Engineered so that everything in the physical plant can be monitored both remotely and on-site.
• Constructed to substantially increase the available Data Center floor space and allow for further expansion as necessary.

The new Data Center will access the state fiber infrastructure so there will be no degradation in data communications capacity. Some information technology equipment will be moved from the old Data Center to the new Data Center, but many system components will be replaced by more technologically advanced components.

To further enhance the availability and security of the data housed at the State Data Center, ITS now expects that the present Data Center will be retained, allowing the development of a more complete business recovery plan. The second Data Center will not only provide for state owned disaster recovery facilities, but will also facilitate any cooperative processing requirements.