The recently established (and still not recognized by most of the international community) Republic of Crimea is building a government data center to assist with ‘digitization’ of the country.

The delivery of the facility will be carried out by state-owned Krymtechnologii (Crimea Technologies), an organization that reports to the Ministry of Communications.

According to Cnews.ru, the hardware alone is expected to cost at least 148.2 million rubles ($2.2m), but the project might be complicated by Western economic sanctions.

Crimean peninsula
Crimean peninsula – Thinkstock / Bigandt_Photography

Digging in

In March 2014, following popular unrest across Ukraine and dissolution of the elected government, the Crimean peninsula – a historic hub for the Russian navy - was taken over by local separatists and units of the Russian Armed Forces. In the following months the region held a referendum the results of which suggested that its citizens want to join the Russian Federation.

Russia then promptly annexed the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol and renamed it the Republic of Crimea.

So far just eight other countries have recognized the legitimacy of the takeover, but that hasn’t stopped the Russian government from applying its currency, legal system and even the Moscow time zone to the new territories.

In order to help incorporate the peninsula into the Federation, the new Crimean government has launched numerous infrastructure projects, including one that calls for a state-owned data center. The facility is meant to process citizen information and improve the technological capabilities of the government as a whole.

The report in Cnews.ru notes that the related government tenders are very specific about the risks involved, and the conditions for cancellation of contracts – likely due to economic sanctions that prevent some of the world’s largest IT suppliers from doing business with Russian companies.

As for hardware, the tenders reveal that the data center will initially host around 100 servers that have to be compatible with various distributions of Linux.

Krymtechnologii is no stranger to data center design, and already runs a commercial colocation facility in Crimea that offers managed hosting, virtual servers, security services and DDoS protection.