The official IRNA news agency said the NIN Mother Data Center had been inaugurated earlier in the day in a ceremony attended by telecoms authorities and senior government and parliament officials.

It said the data center would host 100 racks and is capable of accommodating hundreds of data servers. Its capacity for Internet exchange points (IXP), through which Internet infrastructure companies connect with each other, is one terabit per second, the report added.

The new facility has been named after Martyr Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian major general killed in a US airstrike in the Iraqi capital Baghdad in January.

The data center’s opening comes after two main Iranian mobile operators launched their own data centers earlier this year to increase capacity for cloud computing and help Iran’s telecoms ministry to advance its plans on full implementation of the NIN.

Addressing the inaugural ceremony, Iran’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology (ICT) Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said the new data center had been designed and launched only in a matter of six months.

Jahromi said the center would hugely boost plans to develop the use of key online services on the NIN, including search engines, messengers and electronic mail services.

“This development is an effective step toward improving the quality of basic services on the NIN,” said the minister, adding that the data center would have two separate 500-server capacities for messenger and search engine applications.

Using the NIN on a nationwide scale helped Iran cope with a long internet blackout that was imposed during riots caused by fuel price hikes in November 2019.

Government authorities believe a full rollout of the NIN could hugely boost online services in Iran and help increase security across the network.

 

Press TV contributed to this story.