NE BUSINESS BUREAU
CHENNAI, SEP 1
Southern Railway General Manager John Thomas inaugurated the new Data Centre of Indian Railways in Chennai on Wednesday, says a press release.
“The Southern Railway Data Centre caters to the Passenger Reservation System (PRS), Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) and the Mobile Ticketing System over Southern, South Western and South Central Railways. The old Data Centre had been established in 1985 and over the years had become congested and was badly in need of infrastructure renovation to cater to the steady growth, touching thousands of counters and over 9 lakh tickets per day, including the online ticketing platform of IRCTC. This necessitated establishing a new Data Centre in the second floor of the Chennai Moore Market Complex,” Thomas said.
The new Data Centre replaces the 1980’s vintage Data Centre in the same building near Chennai Central Railway Station. The Chennai regional Data Centre houses the Servers of PRS, UTS, Mobile Ticketing, National Train Enquiry System and a host of other services and applications for public as well as for Railways’ internal working. The new Data Centre complex includes rooms for Servers, Communication equipment, Service Providers and other technical requirements as well as renovated and refurbished offices of Chief Commercial Manager/Passenger Marketing, Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), Railway Console Office, Data Base Management office etc.The New Data Centre has 16 racks for Servers, 10 racks for Communication equipment and includes provision to accommodate future development up to next 20 years or 16 more racks, the statement added.
Shri John Thomas, GM, Southern Railway inaugurated the New Data Centre for PRS/UTS ticketing at Chennai Moore Market Complex today
The refurbished Data Centre houses futuristic communication equipment & cutting-edge technology to enrich various ticketing services for passengers pic.twitter.com/1woTXiclpx
— Southern Railway (@GMSRailway) September 1, 2021
DRM/Chennai was the agency executing the work for the Commercial department of Southern Railway with a sanction of Rs 14.31 crore having been granted by Railway Board. M/s.NIKOM Infra solutions Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi was the executing agency.
Shri John Thomas, GM, Southern Railway inaugurated the new PRS/UTS data centre at Chennai Moore Market Complex
The new Data Centre boasts of latest and cutting edge technologies and protection systems pic.twitter.com/NSI5YhE70e
— Southern Railway (@GMSRailway) September 1, 2021
From the night of Saturday, the old Data Centre had been shut down and all ticketing activities, charting activities had been going on from the Disaster Recovery Site at South Central Railway, Secunderabad. The Chennai Servers finally came fully online at around 01.30 am on Wednesday when the booting up activity was successfully done at the new complex.
Among those present at the inaugural function were BG Mallya, Additional General Manager; Ravi Valluri, Principal Chief Commercial Manager; J Vinayan, Chief Commercial Manager (Passenger Marketing); Ganesh, Divisional Railway Manager, Chennai and Sachin Punetha, Additional Divisional Railway Manager-II, Chennai and Tej Partap Singh, Regional General Manager, CRIS (Centre for Railway Information Systems).
