NCC shelves EOI submission by Tier III Data Centres

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has put on hold the submission of expression of Interest (EOI) by Tier III data centres in the country for local hosting of the commission’s website and online applications.

The NCC intimated the public with the latest development via a piece of document on its official website signed by Umar Danbatta, its executive vice chairman and chief executive officer.

Earlier, the NCC had published a bid solicitation advertisement in the Leadership and the Nation Newspapers of Monday, March 9, 2020 and the Federal Tenders Journal of Monday, March 9 to Sunday, March 22, 2020 edition, to invite submissions of Expression of Interest (EOI) for the Tier III Data Centre for Local Hosting of NCC Website and Online Applications.

“Eligible interested owners of Tier III Data Centre Facilities were required, among others, to submit their EOI documents no later than 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday 25th March 2020, at the specified location in the Commission’s Head Office, Abuja, to be followed by public bid opening.

“The deadline for bid submission and opening were suspended via advertisements placed in The Nation and Leadership Newspapers on March 25, 2020, due to the Federal Government measures to curtail the spread of the COVIS-19 pandemic.

“It is however, no longer possible to continue the National Competitive Bidding procurement procedure for this project, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant restrictions,” the commission stated.

For the avoidance of doubt, the commission said that “the EOI submissions and planned public opening in respect of this project are hereby cancelled.”

What is a data centre Tier?

Website and online applications are hosted in the cloud  supported by data centres infrastructure to ensure that their resources are available and accessible for users who are scattered all over the world.

Uptime Institute created the data centre Tier classification levels over 25 years ago, and today, they remain the international standard for data center performance.

Data center Tier definitions explain the infrastructure required for data centre operations and there are different Tiers according to the system availability needed.

According information obtained from PhoenixNAP, a tier 1 data centre can be little more than a powered warehouse. They are not required to be very sophisticated. On the other end of the spectrum is a tier 4 data center. This tier gives its clients a guarantee of uptime and 2N (two times the amount required for operation) cooling and redundant power and infrastructure.

These standards will protect most companies. Level IV clients usually never even hear if there are issues at the data center infrastructures due to these redundancies. These standards show just how reliable top-tier systems are.

Tier 2 colocation data centre  is more robust than Tier I centers. Tier II does not have complicated performance hardware. For instance, level III and IV data centers require dual power inputs. Level II does not. Level II gives clients a customizable balance between cost management and performance.

A tier 3 data centre can perform repairs without any notable service disruption. Another way to define a level III provider is that they offer the amount of support required for operation plus a backup, giving all-time availability for clients

However, as with any technology product, unplanned maintenance may still cause a problem in a level III provider. In short, level III is even tolerant of some faults.