Komatsu tests Telstra's disaster recovery skills

Background

Speaking at EMC’s Inform event in Sydney, Harvison also revealed the journey the company took to decommission its data centre and rely exclusively on hosted IaaS.

In 2009, the majority of the company’s server footprint was Dell Itanium IA64 servers that were five years old and out of lease.

"It was becoming expensive to acquire them, Dell stopped making them," Harvison said.

Meanwhile Komatsu's Fairfield data centre was leasing a UPS after its own failed. The facility was also in need of new air conditioning system.

"We stepped back and asked ourselves, is the job of IT to be a facilities manager?"

The company began its virtualisation journey by first porting its SAP applications from Itanium onto x86 – a “tough but not impossible task”, and consolidating 90 physical servers down to 9 using VMware's vSphere, with a view to eventually moving it's workloads into a third party data centre.

The company signed a five year, $35 million deal to have 100 percent of its IT infrastructure - both x86 platform and its mainframe - managed by Telstra's 'Network Computing Services' for five years.

Harvison told iTnews that the company had leased EMC storage in 2009, just prior to outsourcing it's IT. Once it made the decision to outsource to a third party, it demanded in its tender that the outsourcers take on those leases.

This way he could ensure that Komatsu's investment in vSphere and EMC storage would not go to waste.

Harvison expressed concerns that over time, Komatsu's internal technical knowledge will decrease whilst its partners will increase.

The best thing about not having to run a data centre anymore, by contrast, was that he did not have to concern himself with facilities issues such as water, fire repellant systems and generator fuel.

“Keeping a tiered data centre operational is a big headache,” he said.

The agreement with Telstra involves the telco managing Komatsu’s environment “all the way up to the OS”, leaving only applications and business processes in Komatsu’s court.

“We can now focus on leveraging technology for the business’ sake,” he said.