NBN Co eyes April start for Global Switch

Transition from Big Blue to begin.

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NBN Co expects to begin running some of its corporate IT systems out of Sydney's Global Switch data centre from April.

The network builder has begun working through migration and exit strategies from an interim IBM managed services agreement it signed about a year ago.

That agreement saw IBM host some of NBN Co's IT systems, including procurement, asset management and accounting.

The IBM agreement enabled NBN Co to scale up its corporate systems from the Quickbooks deployment on which the company ran for its first three months of operation.

It was unknown exactly how or when NBN Co would migrate corporate functionality out of Big Blue's Sydney data centre to Global Switch, and how that functionality would fit into NBN Co's standard architecture.

Sources told iTnews that NBN Co had insisted on using its own servers to host its systems within the IBM environment, primarily for security purposes.

It was understood the servers were not Cisco boxes that have become the standard hardware for NBN Co's data centre operations.

NBN Co signed a three-year, $3 million deal to make Global Switch its primary data centre and another deal to set up Queensland's Polaris as its secondary facility.

NBN Co was using some of the space in its Global Switch suite as an interim point of interconnect (PoI) servicing its two first-release sites in NSW: Kiama Downs/Minnamurra and Armidale.