Feds appoint new data centre panel

The Federal Government has added four suppliers to its Data Centre Facilities Supplies Panel as part of its program to cut costs and increase the efficiency of its technology infrastructure.

The new suppliers are Australian Data Centres, Canberra Data Centres, Datapod (Australia), and NextDC Limited.

In a blog post earlier today, Mundi Thomlinson, assistant secretary at the Department of Finance and Deregulation, said the updated panel augments the government’s existing arrangements.

He said it offers agencies a more scalable and flexible method to meet a wide range of requirements.

“Under these new data centre procurement arrangements, we will be entering [into] service contracts rather than leases to procure supplies from located in Australia.”

In 2010, the government created a new data centre strategy and setup a panel for data centre facilities, which covers 20 sites across Australia.

In April last year, the Australian government’s CTO, John Sheridan, said the government had signed more than $300 million worth of data centre contracts and avoided $24 million worth of costs.

This followed the April 2008 review by Sir Peter Gershon, which suggested that if the government didn’t change its data centre arrangements over the next 10 to 15 years, it would incur an extra $1 billion in costs.

At the time, the government was spending $870 million per year on outsourced and insourced data centres.