Tassie builds strategy to win datacentres
Tasmania's premier yesterday announced that his government was developing a strategy to lure datacentres to the state in a bid to create more jobs.
(Datacentre 3 image
by Simon Picken, CC2.0)
"Datacentres and 'server farms' will allow the establishment of new industries and thousands more jobs over the next decade," Premier David Bartlett said in a statement.
He said Tasmania had already managed to set up a call centre industry employing over 5000 people by using a similar strategy.
The datacentre strategy would find and highlight the advantages of hosting a datacentre in Tasmania and form policies to support other innovative industries which might emerge from datacentre growth within Tasmania. Any barriers to setting up the facilities in the state were to be noted and addressed.
The National Broadband Network roll-out, which is currently going ahead in Tasmania, would be a key drawcard for companies wanting to set up datacentres in the state, Bartlett said.
"High speed optic fibre along with our abundance of renewable energy and secure environment makes Tasmania a very attractive location for new datacentres," he said.
The government also intended to use its own datacentre requirements as a lever to prop up the strategy, according to the premier.
These requirements came under review in 2007 as the government's Information Systems Branch decided to reconsider its IT Infrastructure Strategic plan. The revision was intended to develop strategies for the provision of IT Infrastructure such as servers, desktops, networks and storage, as well as services such as disaster recovery. The review was carried out in 2007, with 16 recommendations endorsed in August 2008.
The recommendations lead to the formation of design specifications for upgrades to government infrastructure. The Department of Treasury and Finance released a tender yesterday for a vendor to provide it with centralised storage, due to a strong trend in electronic data growth.
The Department of Treasury and Finance currently uses around 2TB of storage and would like to have 7TB of usable storage. The department has purchased two fibre pairs which will be dedicated to the storage area network traffic at the two storage sites. Delivery of the storage network was to be completed by September 2010.