OCBC builds S$240m regional data centre

OCBC Bank has built a S$240 million regional data centre designed and customised to its requirements.

The new facility is believed to be the first such purpose-built centre developed and owned by a Singapore bank.

The data centre is designed to support the operational requirements of OCBC Group entities for the next 30 years, the bank said in a statement.

It has been operational since the third quarter of last year and is located on a 0.5 hectare plot in the eastern part of Singapore - equivalent to half the size of a football field - with a built-up floor area of 134,500 sq ft across six storeys.

A bank spokesman declined to divulge the exact location for security reasons.

The data centre hosts thousands of devices with expanded capacity to serve the needs of the OCBC Group, including Bank of Singapore, OCBC Wing Hang, Great Eastern, Lion Global Investors and overseas branches across 18 countries.

It is designed to withstand external physical threats, with blast-resistant building walls and reinforced perimeter walls to prevent intrusion.

It is also equipped with its own back-up power facility that can sustain full operations for at least 48 hours - sufficient fuel to fill up the tanks of 2,300 cars - when the external power supply is cut.

"As the data centre is a critical and core facility for any bank, we wanted a dedicated data centre owned by us and not one that is leased. This is to ensure we can have full control over its security and design - so that it is completely tailored to our exact requirements," said Lim Khiang Tong, the head of group operations and technology at OCBC Bank.

"More importantly, we wanted to ensure that the transition and migration from our old facility to our new data centre was seamless with no impact to our customers - this was a huge feat considering the scale of our operations and the number of servers and network devices we have. We also had to make sure that this huge investment is ready to serve our expanding business for the group for many years to come."

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