Airservices Australia is on the search for local suppliers to pitch in on a plan to overhaul its core compute infrastructure, potentially outsourcing its IT services.
The Australian Government-owned entity, which is tasked with providing air navigation services around the country, issued a request for information (RFI) on 20 April, in a bid to work out the best way to transition from an internally-managed IT environment to a fully managed service scenario in partnership with third party suppliers.
According to Airservices Australia, the organisation’s underlying infrastructure is approaching end of life, prompting it look at the way its services and infrastructure are provisioned.
“The objective of this RFI is to gather information from organisations to enable Airservices to better understand market capability, the range of options available, and to identify parties who have the capacity and experience to satisfy Airservices requirements in delivering Infrastructure as a Service,” tender documents stated.
“Airservices is considering new ways of delivering core compute, including the provision of support of the platform including but not limited to operating systems, backups, archiving, exchange, Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager and Active Directory,” the documents said.
The service would also be required to provide monitoring and management tools support under a managed service arrangement.
Also being considered by the organisation is end user compute (EUC) device provision and support, including asset management, software packaging and deployment, and patching.
Currently, Airservices’ core computing infrastructure involves internally-owned and managed data centres in Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane as well as a presence in a data centre in Canberra.
Airservices’ core compute and end user compute environments are managed in-house and comprise of 150 physical servers, providing platform services for application hosting as well as the virtualisation platform, which offers 600 virtual machines.
The organisation’s existing IT infrastructure fleet incudes approximately 5000 end user compute devices, comprising 2800 desktops and 2100 laptops, distributed across 50 locations within Australia.
The organisation has arrangements in place for the provision of EUC devices through whole-of-government leasing arrangements with EUC support services being provided by an internal team. However, it is now gathering information in relation to how this support is delivered.
As the organisation makes plans to overhaul its IT infrastructure footprint, Airservices is seeking information from businesses that can provide solutions in a single package, such as end-to-end core computing, EUC devices and managed service support for both.
It is envisaged that a potential supplier or suppliers would undertake an initial shift to a hybrid hosted IaaS solution, a managed transformation to a fully managed service environment including backup-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and IaaS offerings.
It would also involve the provision of core compute environment support to the Airservices organisation, operating systems and database technologies (Windows, Linux, Oracle, SQL), system and information backups, archiving, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager, Active Directory and management of all involved third party vendors.
Ultimately, the RFI is aimed at giving Airservices an understanding of current options available in the market place in “sufficient detail” to inform the development of possible solution options.
Organisations that can provide end-to-end solutions may attend Airservices' information sharing seminar on 1 May. Organisations will then invited to submit a response to the RFI to highlight their capabilities and relevant experience.
The submission date for the RFI is 5 May 2017.
Airservices’ move to call on suppliers to pitch in on its IT infrastructure overhaul come after the organisation came under scrutiny by the Australian National Audit Office over the long-running procurement process of the OneSKY system, which aims to combine civil and military air traffic control management systems into one program.
