Immigration signs new data centre deal with CDC

Australia's Department of Immigration has inked a four-year, $24 million deal with Canberra Data Centres to migrate its onsite secondary data centre to CDC's Fyshwick facility.

The department has used CDC's nearby Hume data centre as its primary facility for a number of years already.

But until now it hosted its secondary data centre from within its Belconnen office which, due to the merger of Immigration and Customs this month, will no longer be able to support the the scale of the combined agency.

The onsite facility is unable to consume any more power from its existing mains connection, an Immigration spokesperson told iTnews.

The CDC facility offers unlimited power from two separate mains power grids and "power and cooling redundancy that is far superior to anything available in [Immigration’s] in-house facility" as well as a "far more efficient cooling architecture", according to the spokesperson.

The Fyshwick facility's water retention system means it is almost entirely self-sufficient in terms of its water requirements. It also boasts an uptime rating of 99.995 percent.

The move was also spurred by Immigration's increasing investment in border systems, which the department said would demand additional IT infrastructure and data centre capacity in the coming years.

It's also a response to the government's 2010 directive that agencies migrate data centre services to selected commercial facilities.

The department went to market in April this year for new secondary data centre supplier, and chose CDC's 5000 m² Fyshwick facility as the winning bid this month.

It will now start progressively migrating its existing onsite facility to Fyshwick before its building lease expires in 2019.

The facility currently contains 67 racks, but the majority of the services running within the racks are virtualised, making the migration somewhat easier, an Immigration spokesperon said.

It will use "virtual migration technologies" to shift the services into the new data centre in line with its hardware refresh cycle.

Immigration will join many other federal government agencies to set up shop inside the Fyshwick facility once its migration is complete. Human Services became the data centre's anchor tenant in May this year.

The data centre migration is part of a wider drive to consolidate the infrastructure and systems of the former Customs agency with Immigration.

These projects will now be led by Randall Brugeaud as the agency's new CIO after former IT chief Matthew Yannopoulos left to join the Health department as its new chief information officer.