OREANDA-NEWS. October 21, 2010. MegaFon recently launched a new data center in Samara which, according to experts, is the most reliable and secure of its type in Russia. Project investment exceeded 900 million rubles. CROC designed and integrated the engineering infrastructure for the facility of 6,912 square meters (74,400 square feet).

MegaFon is the only one of three major mobile networks in Russia that operates its own network and provides an entire range of mobile services throughout the country. The new data center is set to become an industry flagship and the backbone of the future national data center network.

“This is the first time a brand new, state-of-the-art, data storage and transmission facility of this size has been built in Russia for commercial use,” said Valery Ermakov, MegaFon’s Chief Operations Officer. “Data centers are the keystone of our infrastructure and enable us to provide our domestic and global clients and partners with cutting-edge information technology services.”

The center’s facilities are now available to a wide range of domestic and global companies. Among the services it offers are IT equipment housing and Internet connection, co-location, and managed hosting.

CROC's specialists designed and installed 16 engineering systems for the data center, including power supply, climate, fire safety, and security systems. All systems are managed using a unified control center—the intelligent heart of the engineering infrastructure.

“We ensured 100% backup of all engineering subsystems and the data center can operate independently 365 days a year without service interruption,” said Alexander Shirokov, the Director of CROC's Intelligent Building Department. The Uptime Institute has given preliminary confirmation that the center complies with TIER 3 standard which has a failure tolerance of 99.982%. We are now focusing on obtaining official TIER 3 certification for the beginning of 2011–a development that would result in the creation of Russia’s first official data center with a maximum downtime of as little as 1.6 hours a year. Indeed, there are currently only 14 data centers in the world that are TIER 3 certified. It is clear that companies using this standard for their data centers are committed to investing in their futures, securing unique competitive advantages, maximizing business flexibility, and increasing strength."