NBN Co chooses Global Switch for data centre

Sydney facility to be network operator's IT hub.

Federal Government-funded telco NBN Co has chosen Sydney's Global Switch as its primary data centre in a three-year deal worth $3 million.

NBN Co said it chose the eight year old facility for its IT systems after a competitive tender process.

The company said Global Switch facility was "secure, environmentally friendly and well-run."

The facility is also in the same city as the telco's corporate office. NBN Co's network operations centre, however, is located in Melbourne.

NBN Co head of corporate services Kevin Brown said the company had struck a deal that would allow its data centre footprint to be "up-scaled" as the company grew.

He expected Global Switch to provide a "cost effective" hosting solution using NBN Co's IBM hardware.

NBN Co was yet to decide on where to host a secondary data centre.

The company's data centre strategy is being run by Neal O'Brian and Mike Huxley.

Other big winners from NBN Co's shopping list to date have included:

• Alcatel-Lucent - A $70 million deal to provide GPON and Ethernet aggregation kit
• McKinsey-KPNG - a $25 million deal to write the NBN Implementation Study
• Oracle and IBM - in deals worth $23 million, to provide Oracle's eBusiness Suite (business systems), running on the Oracle VM hypervisor running on IBM servers and storage.
• Data#3 - an undisclosed deal to set up NBN Co's office IT environment.
• Bilfinger Berger Services; Downer EDI Engineering; Service Stream Communications; Transfield Services; Visionstream Australia; GHD; and Silcar for network design in undisclosed deals to design first release network sites.