ANU seeks private cloud contractor

The Australian National University has announced plans to establish an "internal data cloud" for providing storage and computing power to enterprise and research users.

It sought contractors to build the service at two on-campus data centres, which were connected via direct fibre and the university network backbone.

According to tender documents, the cloud should be "easily scalable to tens of petabytes" and seamlessly provide data currently held and managed by disparate groups across campus.

The two sites were intended as "mirror images of each other", so services would continue in the event of an outage at either site.

They would consolidate a storage area network managed by the university's Division of Information, and the National Computational Infrastructure's tape libraries and virtual infrastructure.

Because the data cloud targeted a range of users, it had to support large-scale data processing for research as well as having enterprise storage capabilities with a minimum uptime of 99.9 percent.

Contractors were also expected to provide management tools including application-level performance monitoring, capacity planning, utilisation monitoring and reporting, and billing.

The University highlighted the possibility of adding either a third site to the data cloud, or relocating the second site away from its main campus in Acton, west Canberra.

It requested that tenderers submit proposals for a five-year agreement, with two two-year extensions, by 30 November.