RailTel To Set Up 102 Edge Data Centres Across India To Improve Digital Services
New Delhi, Jan 12: To accelerate digital transformation in rural and semi-urban areas, RailTel has decided to create several “Edge Data Centres,” with partners.
“RailTel is seeking partners to establish Edge Data Centres in the Railway premises and across 102 locations, especially Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns. This activity will entail an investment opportunity of around Rs 50 crore,” said the official statement.
The process to establish these Edge Data Centres has been set in motion with the floating of Expression of Interest (EOI), inviting the industry to partner in this exercise.
“Edge data centres are small data centres located at the edge of the network, where they are closer to end users and devices.
“Having such kind of facility at the edge would enable faster performance and lower latency as organisations will not have to move the data to far-flung data centres to process it,” it said.
Talking about the project, Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel said, “With the help of such localised Data Centres, rural areas can be served with low latency applications related to digital skills, financial inclusions and digital literacy.
“The move will be another important step towards the path of digital transformation. It will also provide an opportunity to local professionally skilled manpower to participate in this transformation,” he added.
Under the proposed plan, Initial capacity of envisioned Edge Data Centre at each location can be of around 20 Racks (5 KW to 10 KW each).
However, the Edge Data Centre with variable rack and power density, can be explored as per the requirement and availability of space, power and other factors at individual locations.
The statement said RailTel has around 9300 Points of Presence (PoPs) and extensive optical fiber connectivity along the Railway Tracks and across the premises of Indian Railways, which makes the basic infrastructure readily available for the setting up of such Edge Data Centres. RailTel shall have the responsibility of providing the telecom/internet connectivity to the Selected Business Associate.
Edge Data Centres will enable RailTel to deploy IT infrastructure for ‘caching’ of popular contents to improve the experience of RailWire broadband customers as cached contents will then be served locally instead of travelling long stretch of Network.
These centres will also enable to improve resiliency of network and help to improve customer experience of ‘RailWire’ broadband services of RailTel.
The current subscriber base of RailTel is around 4.4 lakh and it will further rise sharply with the coming up of such Edge Data Centre.
RailTel already has 2 UPTIME USA certified Data Centres-one in National Capital Region (Gurugram) and other Secunderabad, it added.
