New Delhi: With a plan to accelerate the pace of digital transformation and efficient digital delivery in rural and semi-urban areas, RailTel has decided to create several 'Edge Data Centers' in such areas across the country.
'Edge data centers' are basically small data centers 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 organizations will not have to move the data to far-flung data centres to process it," said a statement of RailTel.
It further added, "Latency has always been a problem for data centre managers, but in recent times it has become a critical concern in view of wide range of next-generation applications like big data, the Internet of Things, Cloud and streaming services, and other technology trends."
RailTel is also seeking partners to establish such Edge Data Centres in the Railway premises/land across 102 locations especially Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns.
Explaining about this exercise, RailTel stated, "The prospective Business Associates/partners should be a company registered in India. This activity will entail an investment opportunity of around Rs. 500+ Crore. The process to establish these Edge Data Centres has been set in motion with the floating of Expression of Interest (EOI) inviting industry to partner in this exercise."
Under the proposed plan, the Initial capacity of envisioned Edge Data Centre at each location can be around 20 Racks (5 KW to 10 KW each). However, 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.
RailTel has around 9300+ Points of Presence (PoPs) and extensive optical fibre 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," the statement said.
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 a long stretch of Network. Similarly, IT infrastructure for ‘peering’ with content players can also be deployed in these Edge Data Centres which would improve cost economics for delivery of contents (eg. Youtube, Hotstar, etc.)
These centres will enable RailTel to improve the resiliency of the network and help to improve the customer experience of “RailWire” broadband services of RailTel. The current subscriber base of RailTel is around 4.4 Lakhs and it will further rise sharply with the coming up of such Edge Data Centre.
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