Long road lies ahead for AP data migration

Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh government data continues to be hosted at the State Data Centre at Gachibowli, which caters to the requirements of both Telugu states. Due to the increased number of digital applications and platforms coming up, the TS government had asked AP to vacate the data centre last year. The AP government has sought time until June next year.

A data centre is a centralised location where computing and networking equipment is present for collecting, storing access to large amounts of data. The State Data Centre hosts AP data related to 340 applications including Mee Seva, electricity, e-Pragati, transport, issuance of ration and Core Dashboard.

The data centre in Gachibowli maintained by Wipro is relatively small and TS needs more space to host it applications. AP occupies more than 40 per cent of the space. 

According to a TS official, “Recently AP awarded the contract to a private agency and they will be initiating the migration to Vijayawada soon, which is the only piece left."

Executive director, AP State Fibernet, Mr Rama Rao Atluri, said, “AP is currently co-hosting the data centre with Pi-data Centre at Mangalagiri. Migration of applications from Hyderabad to Mangalagiri requires establishing of servers and storage. Infrastructure readiness is on cards.  The procurement of servers and implementation will be completed by June 2019.”

AP is using AP Private Cloud which will be hosted on Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service created for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres. This is a huge stack and being developed in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard (HP).

Mr Rao said, “We are performing trials on small applications and once we are secure we will move the real-time applications involving financial transactions. About 80 per cent of 340 applications at the Hyderabad data centre are active. To ensure that migration happens seamlessly, we will be doing trials on inactive applications which do not affect daily activities. Initially birth, death and caste certificates applications will go on trial.”

Data centre migration is time consuming because the data needs to be copied, shipped, and redirected without interruption of citizen services. As per the Reorganisation Act, the AP data can be stored at Gachibowli only for 10 years. Even though five years are left, officials said that activity will be performed only after full-fledged trials are completed