Dell EMC has won a $24.2 million hosting contract from the Federal Government’s Department of Human Services (DHS).
Tender documents show that the multi-million dollar arrangement runs between 8 June this year to 7 June 2020 and involves hardware support and maintenance in addition to components for information technology, broadcasting or telecommunications.
A spokesperson from the DHS told ARN that, specifically, the contract was forged with EMC and is for the supply of hardware and associated software to upgrade the department’s existing X86 based application hosting environment.
In addition, the spokesperson mentioned that the contract is not part of a broader IT project.
The contract was won via an open tender process through the department’s Computer X86 Servers and Associated Services procurement panel, which was established prior to Dell’s acquisition of EMC and subsequent name change to Dell EMC.
The panel also counts Dimension Data, Hewlett-Packard Australia, IBM Australia, Fujitsu Australia and Datacom Systems as fellow suppliers.
The Dell EMC contract win comes off the back of another recent tender contract the tech giant won in July.
As reported by ARN, that deal saw Dell EMC step up as the technology partner tasked with building the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) new $4 million supercomputer system, which went live in early July.
The new CSIRO system includes 114 PowerEdge C4130 with NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, NVLINK, dual Intel Xeon processors and 100Gbps Mellanox EDR InfiniBand, totaling 1,634,304 CUDA Compute Cores, 3,192 Xeon Compute Cores, 29TB RAM, plus Bright Cluster Manager Software 8.0.
The supercomputing project is aimed at expanding the CSIRO’s capability in deep learning, a key approach to furthering progress towards artificial intelligence (AI), and providing capability for research in areas such as virtual screening for therapeutic treatments, traffic and logistics optimisation, modelling of new material structures and compositions, machine learning for image recognition and pattern analysis.
Dell Australia also won a $6 million server and network storage contract from the DHS in June, which was also forged prior to Dell’s acquisition of EMC.
While both this deal and the $24.2 million tender are not part of a broader IT project, the contract comes as the department is in the midst of its billion-dollar welfare payments system overhaul.
In July, IBM Australia was granted a $32.6 million contract from the DHS for the provision of its Power Systems server infrastructure, while in March, Canberra IT services provider, Forward IT, was handed a $5.14 million, three-year contract by the department for the provision of computer equipment and accessories.
