Summary
- Either of the government's two data centres is designed to carry 100% of its technology operations.
- The new facility uses a design equivalent to Tier III with redundant power, cooling, and communications.
- Closed-loop cooling is designed to operate without consuming water.
The Government of the Balearic Islands has put a second data centre into operation in Palma, creating a platform split across two sites intended to keep regional government and health systems running if either facility becomes unavailable.
The new centre works with the existing Sant Pere data centre as a distributed redundant platform. The government says either location can independently assume 100% of the administration’s technology operations if the other goes out of service.
Redundancy therefore extends beyond duplicate equipment inside one building. Compute, storage, networking, electrical systems, and cooling capacity have to remain sufficient at both locations to support the full workload.
The new facility has been designed to standards described by the government as equivalent to Tier III, with announced availability above 99.982%.
Power, cooling, and communications systems are redundant, allowing planned maintenance to be carried out without interrupting digital services.
Auxiliary technical areas are separated from the main technology environment so maintenance work or failures in supporting plant are less likely to affect critical systems.
The facility will support infrastructure used by the regional administration and the Servei de Salut de les Illes Balears, linking its availability directly to public services and healthcare systems.
The government also presents the project as part of its digital sovereignty policy, keeping critical public data and infrastructure under direct regional control.
The resilience claim will depend on keeping both sites aligned after commissioning. Applications, hardware, data volumes, and network requirements will continue to change, and duplicated capacity has to grow with them.
The government has not disclosed the IT load or electrical capacity of either site, so the amount of spare or duplicated physical capacity cannot be quantified publicly.
The new facility uses closed loop cooling that the administration says does not consume water.
That reduces direct cooling demand on water supplies in an island market where residential use, tourism, agriculture, and infrastructure already compete for the resource.
Closed loop cooling does not determine the overall efficiency of the data centre. Pumping power, heat rejection, operating temperatures, and the efficiency of the mechanical plant still affect total electricity consumption. No PUE figure has been published.
The larger operational challenge is maintaining the 100% failover capability as the technology estate grows.
A secondary location can meet the full load at commissioning and gradually fall behind if new services, storage, or compute capacity are added only to the primary site. Preventing that drift requires continuing investment in both facilities.
Regular failover testing will also be needed to confirm that data replication, network routing, applications, and operational procedures work under real recovery conditions.
The opening of the Palma facility establishes the physical redundancy. Long term resilience will depend on whether both sites retain enough current capacity to operate the administration independently.
