October 30, 2013

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Janet Wilson, Public Information Manager
Arkansas Department of Information Systems
501-683-1791
dis.arkansas.gov
janet.wilson@arkansas.gov

New State Data Center to Provide Backup, Recovery Safeguard for Essential State IT Applications

LITTLE ROCK - In partnership with the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA) and the Arkansas Building Authority (ABA), the Arkansas Department of Information Systems (DIS) has acquired a secondary data center facility in West Little Rock. The additional data center will fortify the state’s ability to maintain availability of technology applications that support the delivery of services to citizens by the public sector.

The facility was purchased by the ADFA on behalf of DIS and the state for $2.1 million including planned improvements. The facility will enable the live backup of critical public data and will allow for the immediate conversion, or failover, of computer systems to the secondary site if an event impacts an entity’s primary site.

“We are very excited about the opportunity to improve continuity of operations for state and local government services and to ensure our environment will support highly available solutions for our citizens,” said Arkansas Chief Technology Officer Claire Bailey. “DIS is working with the appropriate agencies to issue revenue bonds to finance the building acquisition, construction improvements to the facility, and to finance the purchase of IT and network equipment for this facility.”

The additional data center, previously owned by private enterprise, will be utilized to provide highly available, secure public sector cloud services in addition to multiple levels of backup and recovery for systems hosted within the state of Arkansas for state, county, city and educational entities in Arkansas. Failover and disaster recovery testing will be conducted in Little Rock versus out-of-state facilities previously used.

The state has maintained a disaster recovery contract with a private software and technology services company headquartered in Pennsylvania. With Arkansas investing in its own state of the art facility, the services previously obtained through the disaster recovery company will no longer be needed which will eliminate the need for out-of-state travel to conduct disaster recovery exercises and result in cost savings for Arkansas taxpayers.

The new Arkansas facility features a 9,600 square foot, physically secure data center, three diesel powered generators (total 4,950kW) capable of providing power for up to one week, on-site fuel storage, 300 tons of cooling to the IT equipment, concurrently maintainable power and cooling infrastructure, and other redundant mechanisms to ensure successful data and system application recovery operations in the event of a disaster.

January 6, 2014, is the estimated date to begin testing recovery services. The facility is scheduled to reach full production status by February 2014.