Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency details IT infrastructure upgrade

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) is looking to refresh its IT infrastructure with "contemporary" systems and services to allow the Australian government authority to adopt new and emerging digital technologies.

In a request for tender (RFT), ARPANSA announced that as part of its digital transformation, it is seeking the supply, implementation, and associated maintenance of server and storage infrastructure, as well as disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

ARPANSA, the federal government's primary authority on radiation protection and nuclear safety, is charged with the responsibility of protecting people and the environment from the harmful effects of radiation.

With six strategic objectives, ARPANSA aims to protect the public, workers, and the environment from the harmful effects of radiation; promote radiological and nuclear safety and security, and emergency preparedness; promote the safe and effective use of ionising radiation in medicine; and ensure risk-informed and efficient regulation through engaging with community and government and enhancing organisational innovation, capability, and resilience.

The RFT forms part of ARPANSA's Digital Strategy and associated Digital Technology Plan, which is aimed at providing a technology framework to develop new products and services.

"ARPANSA intends to leverage advances in technology to improve how it connects with and provides added value to its customers," the RFT says.

"The transformation to 'digital' will enable ARPANSA to generate new offerings not previously attainable with legacy technologies. This will bring the potential for new revenue streams to safeguard ARPANSA so it remains at the forefront of global radiation research and citizen protection."

With offices in both Yallambie, Victoria, and Miranda, New South Wales, ARPANSA has around 130 staff members, with its Digital Services team and IT help desk both located at the former.

Seven physical servers are currently deployed as virtualisation hosts across both sites. Internet and related services are provided by the Department of Human Services (DHS) in Canberra.

The Yallambie site is also home to the organisation's primary datacentre, while Miranda houses its secondary datacentre, which currently acts as ARPANSA's disaster recovery (DR) facility. Yallambie similarly acts as DR for the secondary datacentre.

The RFT is seeking support for existing Cisco servers, and the removal of a decommissioned server in its Yallambie site. It is also asking for the decommissioning and removal of Cisco servers in Miranda.

Dell EMC VNX5300 enterprise-class storage arrays are deployed for the two main production vSphere 6.5 clusters in Yallambie and Miranda. The storage arrays at both sites each have a capacity of around 59TB of usable storage, of which around 36TB is configured and presented to vSphere hosts. Around 24TB is currently used at both sites.

It is expected that some or all of these solutions will be retired following implementation of an alternative DR solution, ARPANSA said.

ARPANSA seeks also to acquire, build, and configure a new two-node converged or hyper-converged server platform to allow Miranda to operate in a branch office configuration; and consolidate the support and maintenance of existing server infrastructure at ARPANSA's Yallambie office under a new single support contract together with the server infrastructure supplied for the Miranda site.

The RFT closes March 5, 2018 and the final solution is expected to commence installation by April 23, 2018, and be complete by June 15, 2018.

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