Business Plan - City of Prince George

CITY OF PRINCE GEORGE – TECHNOLOGY CENTRE1.0 BackgroundIT backbone is a key strategic asset for any organization. Depending upon the requiredavailability and reliability, the choices organizations have to maintain a robust IT operation are:.1 Have an in-house data centre / server room operation.2 House the IT equipment in a co-location site.3 Have both.Modern organizations seek High Availability and Disaster Recovery systems, located in multiplesites. If one fails the other can be activated seamlessly. Modern data centres need to be flexibleand scalable. IT infrastructure in organizations goes through constant change with networkcapacity upgrades, downsizing, acquisitions, newer technologies and shorter life cycles fortechnology turnover and upgrades.The Uptime Institute reports that 39% of data centre managers expected that their data centreswould run out of cooling capacity in the next 12-24 months and 21% claimed they would run outof cooling capacity within 5 years. With these changing scenarios, Collocation strategies areseen as excellent alternatives to in-house capital intensive infrastructures.1.2 BUSINESS DEMOGRAPHICSThere are various criteria for site selection for a data centre. Some initial criteria for siteselection have been listed below:.1 City of Prince George has two commercial data centres, both of which are owned andoperated by local ISP’s who are already partners in the municipal Fibre project throughthe PGANTF.2 Location is uniquely important to each organization, so that equipment upgrades andmaintenance of servers and facilities can be accomplished effectively when required..3 The City of Prince George is also located in a favorable seismic zone which can be asignificant advantage to business clients. Prince George could potentially offeralternatives to collocation sites in Kamloops, Kelowna and the Vancouver region or othercoastal cities.1.1