The refurbished Data Centre houses futuristic communication equipment and cutting-edge technology to enrich various ticketing services for passengers.

The new Data Centre of Indian Railways at Chennai was inaugurated by Shri.John Thomas, General Manager/Southern Railway today (01/09/2021) in the presence of Shri B.G.Mallya, Additional General Manager, Shri Ravi Valluri, Principal Chief Commercial Manager,  Shri.J.Vinayan, Chief Commercial Manager (Passenger Marketing), Shri Ganesh, Divisional Railway Manager/Chennai and Shri Sachin Punetha, Additional Divisional Railway Manager-II/Chennai and Shri Tej Partap Singh, Regional General Manager/CRIS (Centre for Railway Information Systems).

 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 andover 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.

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 upto next 20 years/16 more racks.

The new Data Centre boasts of latest and cutting edge technologies and protection system such as :

1.         UPS to cater to the entire server farm including triple redundancies

2.         Precision Air conditioning to maintain temperature at optimum levels.3.

3.          Automatic Fire Suppression system and VESDA based fire detection system.

4.         Biometric based access control system at two levels.

5.         24x7 Security with CCTV surveillance system.

6.         Water leakage detection system.

7.         Rodent Repellant System.

8.         Integrated Building Management System (IBMS) to monitor Environment Control, Access Control,Video Surveillance              and Electrical Systems on a 24x7 basis.

9.         Modern plush ambience Interiors with Workstations and chairs.

10.       Structured LAN cabling, wifi and Public Address System.

DRM/Chennai was the agency executing the work for the Commercial department of Southern Railway with a sanction of Rs.14.31 Cr. having been granted by Railway Board. M/s.NIKOM Infra solutions Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi was the executing agency.

From the night of Saturday 28/08/2021, 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 A.M this morning (01/09/2021) when the booting up activity was successfully done at the new complex.

The new complex was dedicated to the nation by Shri.John Thomas, GM/Southern Railway at a small function duly following all COVID protocols on 01/09/2021 (Wednesday).