Geoscience Australia will reduce its data centre storage footprint after signing a $4.7 million deal with incumbent IT services provider Cirrus Networks for a “significant” infrastructure upgrade.
Cirrus revealed the contract in an ASX filing, with the new storage solution to be based on NetApp’s fabric attached storage (FAS) and Cisco’s multilayer director switch (MDS).
The solution will provide “approximately 3PB of useable capacity, with a mix of high-performance SSD and high-density NL-SAS drives to meet the requirements of various workloads”, Cirrus said.
It will also be “mirrored across Geoscience Australia’s primary and secondary data centres to provide high availability and disaster recovery”.
The Perth-based managed services firm said the upgrade, which will be completed by July, will mitigate operational risks posed by a storage environment that had reached its end-of-life.
It will also “provide the platform for future data centre upgrades and enable Geoscience Australia to continue work on modernising their on-premises applications and services”, including migrating some to the cloud.
“Geoscience Australia will reduce their existing data centre storage footprint from 14 racks across two sites, down to a single rack in each data centre,” Cirrus said in a statement.
“This reduction [aims] to provide Geoscience Australia with a simplified management and administration process resulting from the replacement of a number of disparate storage solutions.”
Cirrus estimated the value of the new contract – which has also augmented its managed services agreement with the agency to the tune of “$500,000” – at “in excess of $4.5 million”.
A contract notice published on AusTender in November shows the value of the three-year storage infrastructure upgrade project as $4.7 million.
Cirrus replaced DXC Technology as Geoscience Australia’s IT services provider last year, providing managed services across four bundles.
