Maritime safety body targets regional office IT problems

In tender documents released to the market, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said the upgrade must deliver higher availability, reduce single points of failure, deliver activity and useage logging and monitor system performance and capacity.

AMSA -- which regulates shipping operations around Australia's coastline - said most of the hardware requirements for the upgrade had been purchased, with services the greatest requirement.

The agency has a number of offices scattered around Australia, with its headquarters in Canberra.

While AMSA did not specify precisely what performance problems it had been experiencing in regional offices, the far-reaching scope of the hardware upgrade indicates the extent to which the agency felt it needed to overhaul its existing infrastructure. The agency also stipulates in the tender documentation that due to its always-on operations and frequent interactions with emergency services such as police and Defence, "the need for a secure and reliable infrastructure is paramount".

The upgrade includes transition of a Windows 2000 domain to Windows 2003, Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 running on Windows 2003 enterprise server, shift of a current Citrix Metaframe farm to the latest version of Citrix Presentation Server on Windows 2003, moving the desktop standard operating environment from Windows 2000 Pro/Office 2000 to Windows Vista/Office 2003 and implementation of data synchronisation services for mobile notebook users.