Introduction
On December 21, 2016, Shri Radha Mohan Singh, Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare inaugurated the ICAR-Data Centre at ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi. ICAR Data Centre provides the ICT infrastructure for hosting the web applications developed by ICAR institutes. It also provides the Unified Mail Messaging in ICAR, which is based on Microsoft Exchange Server. The unified communication feature of the solution helps ICAR personnel to stay connected with each other via instant messaging, email, audio/video calls, persistent chat rooms, online meetings and presentations for scientific/ research/ technological/ educational/ extension information exchange. It is providing uniform email IDs (https://mail.icar.gov.in) of ICAR personnel under a single ICAR domain for effective communication at the individual desktop.
The Data Centre provides shared resources as well as co-locating the application-specific servers and Storage Area Network (SAN) facility for hosting the applications. The domain name “icar.gov.in” has been registered and the Unified Communication and Web Hosting Services have been made operational. Digital certificates of Servers were procured and installed SSL to provide the services of different applications through http://icar.gov.in domain.
It meets the international standard of Data Center Tier II specifications with adherence to ISO 27001, ITIL and TIA 942 standards. The solution is based on Structured, Scalable & Resilient Network Architecture. The data center contains servers that are connected to high-performance LAN Switches, for processing millions of packets per second, depending on Users & Application and its contents. The computing environment consists of 448 core computing with 150TB storage space which enables the high speed of computing/processing of data. Virtualization aids in segmentation of computing for resource allocation and making available the need based storage for different applications. In the software component Microsoft Exchange Mail server, WINDOWS and LINUX OS along with various Databases (MSACCES, MYSQL, SQL SERVER, etc) are made available in the Data Center. The Unified messaging solution is based on Microsoft Exchange Server. The unified communication feature of the solution helps ICAR personnel to stay connected with each other via instant messaging, email, audio/video calls, persistent chat rooms, online meetings and presentations for scientific/research/technological/educational/extension information exchange. This will provide a Uniform Email ID of ICAR & its institutes/departments under a single ICAR domain for effective communication at the individual desktop.
Computing Environment
- 448 Core Computing
- 150 TB storage
- Microsoft OS
- Linux OS
- Microsoft SQL DBMS
- MySQL
- Active Directory
- Microsoft Exchange 2013
- Microsoft Lync 2013
- Virtualization
- Switches
Services offered:
- Unified Communication:
- Messaging (Webmail and POP)
- Phonebook
- Calendar
- Schedule meetings
- Chat
- Presence
- Web Conferencing
- Video Conferencing
- Content Sharing
- Virtual Machine and Data Storage
- Web hosting
Features of the solution:
- Scalability
- 24 X 7 Availability
- Interoperability
- Security
- Manageability
- Integration
- Reliability
- Adherence to ISO 27001, ITIL , TIA 942 standards
Benefits:
- Uniform Email ID of ICAR & its institutes/departments under single ICAR domain.
- Implementation of standardized IT policy and deployment of website/application.
- Secure and reliable IT services and infrastructure on demand.
- Aggregation of IT infrastructure (Hardware, Storage, Networking and Software) and Management Resource
- Centralized management of IT infrastructure
- Dynamic Scalability
- Centralized and Simplified Management
- Improved Data Quality
- Lower Risk of Data Los
- Service Level Agreements
