Bank Hapoalim, the largest bank in Israel, now has the first Uptime Institute certified data center in the entire country, with the opening of its new data center.

The bank’s Rotem data center, in the Emek Hefer industrial park north of Tel Aviv, was awarded Tier III certification on June 9, 2015, for the completed facility. 

Concurrently maintainable 

Tier III certification requires a concurrently maintainable data center; that is the facility must be able to run maintenance tasks, even those that require equipment shutdown, without going offline. Redundancy is required for all parts of the data center; IT load, power, and cooling. As with all Uptime Institute certification levels, level three requires that that facility also meet the demands of lower certification levels.

But building a data center in Israel, especially for a financial institution, also requires a certain military mindset. In the Data Center Dynamics Global Data Center Market Overview and Forecast 2014-2020 it was pointed out that Israel “is one of the few markets in the world where the attribute of being ‘defensible’ is used commonly in the business case for the facility.”

Shimon Katz the Bank Hapoalim project manager said “The challenge of achieving the Tier Certification to this project, with its unique characteristics, could not have happened without the mutual cooperation of the bank’s team along with our partners to the design and implementation of the project.”

And while not stating the background that makes such design necessary, Lee Kirby, Uptime Institute’s chief technology officer was quoted as saying “It was particularly fascinating to work with the additional requirements of a physically protected data center and a testament to the risk assessment process the client applied to this project.”