Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies very much. By way of further background, this facility is initially designed to accommodate 600 racks. The project is initially intended to replace four of the State's most essential data centres, which are operated by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Social Protection and An Garda Síochána, with one purpose-built data centre facility owned and operated by the Government. It is intended to then make the facility available to organisations across the public service. With regard to the timeline, it is intended for construction procurement by the Office of Public Works to take place in the third and fourth quarters of this year, for the tender to be awarded and contracts signed in the fourth quarter and for construction to commence in the first quarter of next year. It is hoped that the facility will be completed and commissioned by the end of 2023.

With regard to the environmental impacts of this data centre in particular, it has been designed to be at least twice as efficient as most existing data centre facilities. This represents a large saving of power in the new purpose-built facility. In conjunction with the construction of the data centre, a sustainable energy project is being pursued on the site by the Office of Public Works. This may potentially involve photovoltaic solutions. In addition, hardware rationalisation and upgrading physical to virtual programmes will be a key part of the migration project from existing server rooms to the new Government data centre, which will see both a reduction in overall hardware and the upgrading of hardware to modern energy-efficient models.

I assure Deputy Lawless that the centre will be designed to adhere to industry security standards and will be certified to the International Organization for Standardization security standard, ISO 27001. It is my understanding that the data centre will be operated and run by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, but I will get that confirmed for Deputy Mairéad Farrell.

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