NBN Co has announced it entered into a $9.5 million contract with Cisco for the supply of its data centre equipment.
The three-year deal follows a tender process from which Cisco will provide the data centre computing platform combining computing, network, storage access, and virtualisation into a unified system to support NBN Co’s business and operation systems.
NBN Co head of corporate services, Kevin Brown, said he was pleased to announce the agreement with Cisco.
“We are pleased to have acquired yet another strategic supplier as we continue to construct the building blocks that underpin the operation of the NBN,” Brown said in a statement.
“We look forward to working with their 600-strong team in Australia as we develop the supporting infrastructure for the NBN.”
According to Cisco, the solution will be built upon Vblock technology from the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a collaboration of Cisco, EMC and VMWare.
The Vblock technology supports NBN Co’s requirements for a data centre with the flexibility to scale to meet aggressive growth requirements and the business agility to rapidly roll out new services. While the capability of the Cisco Unified Computing System to unite compute, network and virtualisation resources into a single system also helps NBN Co to substantially improve the energy efficiency of its data centre.
“As Australia shifts toward new communication models with the introduction of the NBN, virtualisation technology will play a significant role transitioning businesses to a new phase of business and IT operation,” VMware Australia managing director, Paul Harapin, said in a statement.
NBN Co recently announced a $3 million contract with international wholesale data centre owner, Global Switch to house its hardware and software systems. In addition to this data centre in Sydney, NBN Co will announce a second data centre location later in the year.
The company has also been on a hiring spree of late, posting an average of three new roles a day on its job vacancy site, as the National Broadband Network (NBN) rollout speeds up.