$40 Million Storage Upgrade Planned by Centrelink

Centrelink has made an announcement that it intends to procure equipment for enterprise storage worth around $40 million which includes disks, mainframes, data archiving and data security products.

Request for Tender (RFT) was expected to be issued by the Federal Agency in the month of October. As per the pre-tender notice, it can include open disk storage systems, data security solutions, archiving solutions and mainframe direct access storage devices (DASD). The other components that are included are storage management software, reporting and chargeback, enterprise document and record management systems along with professional deployment and project management services. The initial plan of Centrelink was to host a briefing for discussing the tender. But it was called off and was postponed until the finalization and release of the RFT.

The former CIO at Centrelink, John Wadeson, had revealed plans for sharing its excessive compute and storage capacity with other agencies that include the Department of Immigration and the Australian Tax Office. Wadeson told that the company’s plan is to create a single infrastructure which houses the data centers for all agencies. He also accepted that this will not be happening anytime soon because the issue on priority is to get Centrelinks’s data centers in a better position. The chargeback and reporting request suggests that the agency is also planning to cater storage as a service to other agencies working in the human services sector.

The data centers that Centrelink has are around 20 years old apart from a small hardware portion hosted at Canberra Data Center in a customized pod as per a deal that was signed last year.