Auckland Council has signed a contract with Revera under its all-of-government supplier role to deliver the council’s post amalgamation transformation programme and core IT infrastructure consolidation.
Revera will supply infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and data centre and transition services to consolidate legacy local council data centres.
When the council was formed, it inherited 11 data centres. Head of information services Mike Foley says these were largely at capacity in terms of physical space, electricity or air conditioning.
Much of the server and storage infrastructure was overdue for replacement and consequently attracted a high operating cost, he says.
“Most of the data centres were fully owned and operated by the legacy councils – the exception being the ex-North Shore City Council (which outsourced to Revera) and ex Manukau City Council (which outsourced the hosting of infrastructure to Datacom).
“Across the legacy councils there was little or no second site redundancy for disaster recovery purposes.”
Foley says an infrastructure strategy has been developed, based on the infrastructure as a service model. “This model provides scalability to support a large programme of change being undertaken across council operations, budget certainty and a lower cost structure.
“Council has, as part of the infrastructure consolidation and rationalisation programme of work, elected to participate in the all of government service offering that has been set up by the Department of Internal Affairs. This provides access to many bulk contractual pricing benefits that are not available to single organisations.”
The Revera contract took effect from September 1. It applies to the acquisition of all new server and storage requirements from that date. Foley says a transformation project is now underway to migrate from the existing data centres. It will take 12 to 15 months to complete, and includes disaster recovery.
Revera CEO Robin Cockayne says that two of Revera’s five Homeland data centres and a dedicated AoG environment on Revera’s IaaS platform will manage council production systems and remotely located disaster recovery services.
“The agreement provides Auckland Council with both volume-based and annualised discounts, and the opportunity to calculate ongoing ICT costs from a catalogue of IT services based on standardised infrastructure and service management practices,” he says.
Cockayne says the win follows a period of growth that has seen Revera land 25 government agency clients since its appointment to the AoG IaaS panel.