As reported by ITNews, Australia Post has completed an extensive overhaul of their data centre service: opening two new facilities and decommissioning five, while NEXTDC’s $130 million flagship M1 Melbourne data centre has become Australia Post's primary production facility – driving financial and operational benefits for the organisation.
AusPost general manager for service integration and operations, Claire Bourke, said the focus of the project was on establishing new technology foundations to upgrade the company's infrastructure and capability.
"Our ageing data centres were not able to deliver the level of service availability required to support our transformation," she said. "We also wanted to consolidate the number of data centres and state-based communication rooms we had to drive financial and operational benefits."
Since the project's completion last month, Bourke says the organisation is already seeing benefits such as higher service availability and a significant reduction in carbon emissions.
ITNews reports that the new infrastructure has given Australia Post the ability to develop virtual-to-virtual capability that allows the organisation to move virtualised workloads – including servers and storage – between data centres without any interruption to services.
Australia Post completed their move into NEXTDC’s M1 data centre in August 2013, Australia Post CIO Andrew Walduck said at the time, “The relocation of Australia Post’s business continuity centre to a new state-of-the-art facility, hosted by NEXTDC, is a significant milestone in Australia Post’s Building Future Ready IT program; enabling us to keep pace with the changing demands of our customers and the need to offer highly available services for a corporation undergoing a digital transformation.”
Walduck explained, “The new data centre increases our agility, speed to market, security and cost transparency. It is part of the broader $2 billion investment in the transformation of our infrastructure, products and services announced late last year by our Managing Director and CEO Ahmed Fahour.”
Commenting on the arrangement, NEXTDC’s CEO Craig Scroggie added, "We are very pleased to be working with Australia Post in support of their data centre growth strategy. Our Data-Centre-as-a-Service proposition and enterprise-class facilities across Australia allow us to accommodate Australia Post’s needs for security, redundancy and flexibility.”
Australia Post's Claire Bourke will be discussing the project at the upcoming Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit.
Book a guided tour of M1 today to experience the data centre’s exceptional energy-efficient design for yourself, and the benefits it offers in security, reliability and support services.
