It has long been clear to those responsible in the state that Thuringia will have to invest a lot of money and work in modernizing its IT technology. Here we go: the state data center is changing its location.
Erfurt (dpa/th) - A significant part of Thuringia's IT infrastructure is being relocated: from the beginning of next year, the state data center is to move from Erfurt to Ilmenau. This was announced by State Secretary for Finance Hartmut Schubert on Wednesday in Erfurt. That will take several months. After that, the current data center in the state capital is to be renovated. According to Schubert, both centers in Erfurt and Ilmenau should be operated in parallel in the long term.
Thuringia has been considering for years how the state's IT infrastructure can be modernized and made future-proof. Large parts of the state administration depend on the state data center - around 350 departments of the Free State with around 20,000 PC workstations. Schubert is in charge of the country's IT systems.
If Thuringia has two data centers in the long term, that will increase security, emphasized the State Secretary. The same data should then be available at both locations. If one of the two data centers were completely destroyed by a natural disaster, for example, the country's data would still be available at the other location.
So far, all essential data from the state administration has been duplicated in the Erfurt data center. The corresponding areas are strictly separated from each other. For example, all important server and computer rooms are available twice. For this purpose, the building is divided into two halves, which are arranged mirror-inverted to each other. However, if the entire building were to be destroyed, the data would be lost.
However, it will still be a few years before Thuringia has a doubly secured, spatially independent infrastructure for its data. The renovation of the data center in Erfurt is expected to begin in 2025, said Schubert. Realistically, it will be completed in 2027 or 2028. The costs for the move and renovation have not yet been finally quantified. A sum in the high double-digit millions will probably accumulate over the entire project period.
