The Western Australia Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF) has moved to set up a whole-of-government sourcing arrangement for government agencies to procure x86 based servers and data storage services.
The arrangement will involve the setting up of an IT servers panel for tower case, rack intensive and blade server gear, and a storage panel for storage solutions, SAN switches and tape library gear.
According to DTF documents, the initiative will result in a more efficient procurement framework for the government agencies and is expected to reduce administrative costs to agencies and industry.
The new sourcing arrangement is also estimated to be control some $60 million worth of IT spend and will run for a minimum of three years with option for two one-year extensions.
Purchasing through the new arrangement will be mandatory for all government agencies within metropolitan areas.
The move follows the August announcement that the DTF was on the hunt for a new Storage Area Network (SAN) as part of an overhaul of its back end IT infrastructure toward establishing a private Cloud.
Mid–year the agency said it was then currently in the process of implementing VMware infrastructure across its two data centres to provide disaster recovery site services, infrastructure-as-service, and virtual machine hosting to service itself and its clients.
As part of the revamp the agency was also moving to new SANs based on a high availability active/active model, which will, according to the DTF, provide the agency and its clients with the ability to quickly establish public presence and production continuity, with Web, application, database and internet services.
In September the DTF claimed success in implementing key projects across the past year as it sought to fully modernise its revenues, tax and shared services systems by 2013.
According to its annual report for the 2009/2010 financial year, the agency would finalise a roll out of Oracle e-Business systems by mid-2012, seeing a total of 90 agencies gain access to the shared services platform.
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