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Hitachi Vantara expands on govt hyperconverged hardware project in $8.4M deal

Coming to a total project cost of $22.8M since April 2020

Hitachi Vantara Australia is to provide more hyperconverged server hardware to the Department of Education, Skills and Employment in a new $8.4 million deal for it to expand its hosting platform. 

According to a spokesperson for the department, the expansion of the platform is to support the government's new digital employment services platform and an apprenticeship data system, as well as a migration from an older hosting environment. 

In addition to the hardware delivery, the most recent contract also covers licences, installation and configuration services, as well as maintenance from 25 January through to 31 August 2023. 

Including this latest contract, the Department has awarded $22.8 million dollars to the systems integrator for the hosting platform since its initial purchase of $3 million worth of Hitachi hardware and VMware services back in April last year

Between then and now, the government awarded $3.5 million over two contracts in May 2020, $1.5 million in June, $6.4 million in August 2020 and just under $200,000 in October 2020 

All of these procurements have been conducted via the DTA’s Hardware Marketplace Panel, which is focused on the supply of IT hardware, infrastructure and associated services. 

The hyperconverged-focused contract wins follow Hitachi Vantara A/NZ’s decision to partner with VMware in November 2019 to launch locally-developed 'Quick Start' bundles for deploying hyperconverged private cloud and hybrid cloud solutions through the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP). 

By combining compute, storage, virtualisation and high availability into a UCP, Hitachi Vantara claimed infrastructure management can be simplified and allow for easy scaling with physical or virtual building blocks.