Today the office of NSW Commerce Minister Paul Lynch issued the shortlist of five private sector vendors that will be invited to tender to build the NSW Government’s proposed two new datacentres.
“The shortlisted applicants have demonstrated they can meet the high standards set by the NSW Government,” Lynch said in a statement. “They will have the opportunity to tender for the construction, operation and ongoing management of the two facilities.”
The shortlisted companies — originally to be announced in March this year — are Global Switch , Gresham Rabo Management, Leighton Contractors, Macquare Capital and The Plenary Group Unit Trust.
The expression of interest (EOI) was released by the Government late October last year and attracted of 17 organisations who submitted responses. High profile organisations axed from the list include Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems and Oracle.
The new datacentres — slated for completion in 2011 — will address the much-needed storage requirements of the government and will merge 130 datacentres across the state. “This is a bold step by the NSW Government to consolidate its agencies’ datacentre capacity,” Lynch said in his statement.
The two datacentres will be located in Sydney and Illawara and will be required to be energy efficient and green friendly. Other sites were considered such as the out skirts of northern ACT, Hunter Valley, the Blue Mountains and surrounding regions.
“This project will not only ensure capacity and safety in relation to government data needs but will also deliver important environmental benefits,” Lynch said. He added that the organisations that submitted EOI’s have set a high bar for the project and it will set a new bench mark for future data centre consolidations.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it until one of these idiots listen.
I look forward to the day when the mechanism of government can be brought to a screeching halt by a simple technical fault.
There is no consideration of risk here. The attitude is “that will never happen”. Funny that, because I can cite plenty of examples of datacentre failures that “should never have happened”.
Perhaps if NSW had a real ICT strategy, and someone who was competent in charge of it, they’d realise that a political decision like this is dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed to be spun.
But what do I know. I’m just a grunt.
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