University of Lahore (UOL) has become the first educational institute in Pakistan to establish a certified Tier III data center.
The inauguration ceremony of the data center was held at Lahore and was attended by Mr. M.A. Raoof (Patron UOL), Mr. Awais Raoof (Chairman BOG UOL), Mr. Javed Wadud (Country Head, EPI Pakistan), Mr. Mahmood Jabbar (CEO TechAccess Pakistan), Mr. Munib Khawaja (Country Head, Schneider Pakistan), Mr. Nawaid Shamim and other notable personalities from IT industry of Pakistan.
Speaking at the event, Chairman UOL Mr. Awais Raoof stressed on the need of Universities in Pakistan to provide exposure to the students to the technologies being deployed around the world, ensuring that our graduating students not only know the theory but also are well exposed to them first hand. He also shared his vision of how universities should change their outlook towards the delivery of education and services.
Significance of this data center
This data center is the first certified Tier III data center in a Pakistani educational institute. Which means that it will offer advanced capabilities like multiple independent paths to serve the IT equipment, housing a dual powered IT equipment and concurrently maintainable site infrastructure with 99.982% expected availability.
UOL will use this new data center for hosting not only Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for labs of 11 diverse Faculties and 32 Departments, Private Cloud for UOL’s over 30,000 students in more than 190 full-time degree programs. & 4,000 faculty members, but also the SAP Student Life Cycle & Campus Management facilities. UOL also aspires to offer these services to various other academic institutions and commercial organization in the near future.
Estimated time to become operational
The University of Lahore has selected Schneider Electric as technology partner while TechAccess Pakistan will work as an integrator at this project. Due to close ties between management of University of Lahore, TechAccess Pakistan, and Schneider Electric, it is expected that this data center will become functional in a time span of around five months.
