AGIMO readies data centre RFTs

James Riley
Friday, 17 September 2010 18:22

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The Federal Government has published a statement of requirements for its data centre migration services panel and expects to publish a full request for tender by the end of the month.

And Australian Government Information Management Office acting deputy secretary John Sheridan says the much anticipated request for tender for the data centre facilities panel is expected to be published within days - and certainly by the end of the month.

The two tenders are central components of the Commonwealth's 15-year Data Centre Strategy that were undertaken in accordance with recommendations in the ICT review conducted by Sir Peter Gershon.

That review concluded that the development of a whole-of-government approach could avoid $1 billion in future data centre costs.

The work undertaken under the two panels represents a huge amount of the Federal Government's total ICT budget. Of the $4.3 billion spent on ICT by Commonwealth departments and agencies annually, $850 million is on data centre.

In a blog post on the AGIMO website, AGIMO central facilities branch assistant secretary Kayelle Wiltshire said the statement of requirements had been published "to promote interest and awareness of the Government's requirements."

With the longer than expected caretaker mode of Government now over, departments are able to report on some of the ongoing work of the past couple of months.

For AGIMO that has meant an active blog this week, and the expected publishing of the full data centre RFT's on schedule by the end of the month.

"We have published the draft (SoR) for data centre migration, which is the second of the two data centre approaches to market that we said we were going to put up in the third quarter of this calendar year," Mr Sheridan said.

"The data centres facilities (RFT) which is the main part of the tender will make the third quarter of this calendar year also. In other words we will do that by the end of the month, maybe even a bit sooner."

The migration services statement of requirements calls for a range of highly specialist services ranging from defining requirements - from confriguration, to environmental to security - to the preparation of SoRs, to the preparation of cost estimates.

It includes requiring the migration services company to identify and procure hardware and software to support the migration, to assess insurance issues and provide that cover and to manage all vendor relationships.

Because migrating to a new Data Centre provides the opportunity to review technical designs and configurations, Finance is also wants companies that are able to provide high level and detailed design services that include investigations of new technologies and new methodologies.

The successful panel tenderers would also provide installation and commissioning services for the new data centre operations, as well as decommissioning of the older data centre site.