Bangladesh Bank Data Center visit by MSc, MPhil and PhD students of CSEDU
Standing tall is a 30 floored old-schooled building in the middle of Motijheel, Dhaka. A building of very high importance is one of the three main buildings of Bangladesh Bank in the area. Organized by our respected Chairman Dr. Md Abdur Razzaque Sir of the Computer Science and Engineering department of University of Dhaka, a group of 30 students in two slots accompanied by Rizvee Sir and Tanvir Sir respectively visited the data center of the Bangladesh Bank located right inside of this 30 floored building. Our target was to get first-hand knowledge about the ins and outs of the Bangladesh Bank’s Data center from the experienced officials themselves.
The tour started with us going to the 28th floor of the building where in a meeting room the senior officials of the Bangladesh Bank shared the different workings and technological aspects of the bank. Bangladesh bank whose main task is to hold the reserve of the country, be a bank of the government and also to perform foreign exchange made us realize how important the bank is. Discussions about the import-export procedure relevant to the bank, server-storage system of the bank, security system of the bank as much as possible without sharing too much of the sensitive information. The vision of having a cashless society and the ecosystem needed to ensure it was also being shared with great excitement by one of the officials.
Later, after this almost one hour seminar added with a snacks break, we went directly to the data center. The data center of Bangladesh bank is actually the most secured part of the building with 24/7 monitoring of the entire surrounding region checking whether there are any anomalous behavior in the system or having any unexpected outsiders. And obviously NO PHOTOS WERE ALLOWED inside! The inside of the data center was very fascinating. It has its own monitoring room, a power room, a battery room, and the main tha data center system room and many more.
The main data center system room has everything in doubles ensuring redundancy. When a particular machine fails its adjacent duplicate machine will take control automatically! There are machines from IBM, Intel etc. There are separate storage machines as well as computing machines. There are machines with both storage and computing systems together also. IBM's storage was about a hundred Terabytes. They have plans to upgrade it up to Petabytes. IBM's storage and computation power is to be allocated for only the most important services. There are dedicated machines labeled with “Banking Services”. There are different types and versatility of machines each with different purposes. But whatsoever, all of them were in doubles. The entire room is ensured with a proper cooling system based on air-flow from the floor. We have also seen sacs of bags attached with certain machines to control humidity. There are some rooms so secured which are behind four more rooms in sequence. The data center is a very highly sensitive and classified place. We were only given a tour of 3 rooms. We only got to see the surface and it was still a very exciting and extraordinary experience. Learned so many things which we would not have otherwise.
Finally, the expected two hour tour which actually took a lot more than that ended with us taking a group photo in front of the building artwork.