Dept Education, Employment and Workplace Relations set for hardware and services refresh?

A major hardware refresh may be on the cards for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) following a request for tender seeking to establish a new panel of providers.

In the RFT document, the DEEWR said it was seeking hardware and services providers across servers, storage, communications (including IP phone equipment), video conferencing and uninterrupted power supplies.

The department, with 6500 staff across Australia and overseas, is the lead government agency providing education and workplace training, transition to new employment, and conditions and values in the workplace.

In the RFT, DEEWR said its current server/storage environment consisted of about 2000 HP Proliant series servers running Windows supporting applications delivered through Microsoft technologies including Sharepoint, SQL Server, Exchange and custom applications based on Microsoft .NET framework.

The 2000 servers are shared across three data centres, each with a storage area network infrastructure with total storage capacity of approximately 660 TB. Extensive clustering technology is also used to provide fault tolerant computing and scalability, the RFT said.

LAN and WAN infrastructure is comprised mainly of Cisco routers and switches for layer three routing and layer two switching. WAN optimisation and application acceleration, IP telephony, video on demand, video streaming and wireless LAN is also used.

To support these additional services, DEEWR has deployed Cisco wide area application servers (WAAS), content engines, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA), wireless access points and Integrated Services Routers (ISR) for IP telephony voice gateways.

In the RFT, the DEEWR said it was currently phasing out existing Microsoft Server 2003 implementations in favour of Microsoft Server 2008 as the standard server operating environment.

Virtualisation technology was also being used to improve efficiency and flexibility with a target of about 500 physical to virtual conversions scheduled for this year.

DEEWR is also actively using Microsoft System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) to manage the environment, including Desired Configuration Manager to diagnose issues, the RFT said.

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