AFP readies data centre move

The Australian Federal Police is preparing to move out of its owned and operated primary data centre in ACT’s south in favour of a managed “private cloud” solution hosted out of a commercial facility in Canberra.

The force secured $32.6 million in the last federal budget to pay for the migration, which is required under the Commonwealth government’s data centre strategy, based around a mandatory central panel of co-located providers.

The AFP has signed a lease with panellist Canberra Data Centres until 2021.

Tender documents released this week show the AFP is hoping to have moved into its new primary facility by July 2018.

It is seizing the opportunity to re-architect its infrastructure, and is looking for a managed service provider to help it achieve a fully virtualised state within the new facility.

The agency says it wants to “overcome the limitation and constraints of the current state environment”.

“The AFP is designing a future state data centre featuring software defined data centre (SDDC), the virtualisation and automation of infrastructure and platform services, and service management,” it says.

It is hoping to exploit some of the increased flexibility and efficiency offered by the transformed infrastructure.

The existing primary data centre is filled with predominantly Dell servers, and is connected up to the AFP’s Canberra location using the government’s ICON dark fibre network.

The AFP will supply its own EMC Isilon file storage to the new site for security purposes.

It warned that a “small number” of legacy applications and appliances it continues to rely upon cannot be virtualised and will have to remain on older resources despite the modernisation.

The agency will also continue to rely on its existing disaster recovery facility in the ACT’s north.