OZ Minerals brings Windows 7 to desktops

OZ Minerals has revealed it is close to completing a desktop upgrade program to bring almost 500 computers into a standard operating environment based on the Windows 7 operating system and Office 2010.

A spokeswoman for the company, which owns the Prominent Hill copper mine in South Australia, told iTnews that the desktop computers previously ran Windows XP and Office 2003.

A new standard operating environment (SOE) was developed by systems integrator Dimension Data, whom OZ Minerals retained in January this year.

"A wide range of other applications are being upgraded as part of this project," the spokeswoman said.

OZ Minerals has also consolidated three data centres down to a single production environment with "interstate disaster recovery services".

The company previously operated multiple legacy facilities inherited from mining companies Oxiana and Zinifex, which merged to become OZ Minerals in 2008.

"The project has focused on applications and services that were already delivered from the legacy environments and covers traditional enterprise services – ERP, messaging, risk management systems, archive and database," the spokeswoman said.

These capabilities have been migrated - with assistance from Dimension Data - to run on Telstra's private cloud compute environment, branded 'Network Computing Services'.

Telstra named OZ Minerals as a cloud customer back in June.

Aside from partnering OZ Minerals on infrastructure projects, Dimension Data is tasked with providing the miner full ICT managed service providing service desk, desktop, server, network and security support to users.

It is also managing a series of application support "services" on OZ Minerals' behalf, including SharePoint and SQL Server.