Lanka’s first carrier-neutral, high-density data centre Orion Stellar launched

On Nov 4, 2021

Digital Realty Pvt Ltd recently launched Orion Stellar, Sri Lanka’s first carrier-neutral and high-density data centre. Orion Stellar has been in planning for over 5 years and hopes to bring cutting edge IT services to Sri Lankan entities. The data centre is housed in a purpose-built building within the Orion City IT Park.

Data centres are very costly in terms of electricity. Orion Stellar has a guarantee of power usage efficiency of 1.4 bringing it in line with international standards. Local clients are expected to be able to have a power savings of up to 40% by migrating their data to the Orion Stellar platform.

Stellar was launched on 3rd November at the Data Centre facility in Orion City IT Park in Dematagoda.

Digital Realty is owned by Dialog Broadband Network (Pvt) Limited, a fully owned subsidiary of Dialog Axiata Plc and St. Anthony’s Property Developers (Private) Limited.

For the transmission of data, Orion Stellar has installed completely mechanical unloading bays allowing equipment to be transferred securely into the data hall of the premises.

Orion Stellar also boasts of significant redundancy and electricity generation facilities on site. The centre has a 2(N+1) Uninterrupted Power Supply system providing 30 minutes of battery backup uptime and an N+1 generator system with fuel storage facilitating 72 -hour uptime. The centre will invest in harvesting solar energy in the future.

The centre hopes to provide clients with pay-as-you-go models that will increase the affordability factor in the deployment of digital services. Due to the computing power of the facility, the centre is suitable for the use of artificial intelligence applications. Even power consumption per co-location space or rack shall be available to clients.

The facility is secured at multiple points with access restricted to centre personnel.

The centre is built in compliance with global data centre standards (TIA-942 Rated 3), colloquially known as a tier 3 data centre, providing redundancy that ensures a theoretical 99.98% uptime for clients.

Digital Realty, Managing Director, Jeevan Gnanam noted that this centre represented his grandfather’s vision of seeing the implementation of an idea through. He said that this was the first centre of its kind in Sri Lanka.

Gnanam noted that there were many challenges to the financial feasibility of the project over the 5-year implementation phase but now the project is ready to be launched.