By Angela Dorizas

Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner has unveiled the Australian Government’s 15-year strategy for data centre management.

In an address to the Future-Proofing Your Data Centre conference in Sydney, Mr Tanner announced that the new strategy would be a whole-of-government approach to managing data centre requirements.

Mr Tanner said the Government was a large consumer of ICT, with a data centre floor space of around 30,000 square metres.

“These are primarily older data centres that are reaching the limits of their electricity supply and floor space,” Mr Tanner said.

“With Government demand for data centre services increasing every year, it was anticipated that footprint would double in coming years.”

Mr Tanner said the data centre strategy would reduce the space required by Government.

“The strategy sets out a plan for consolidating sites and increasing the utilisation of servers and storage,” he said.

“This will significantly reduce the costs and importantly, the environmental impacts, associated with operating data centres.

“By aggregating demand across Government we will also be able to procure services that better meet the data centre needs of the federal public sector.”

Mr Tanner said the strategy was divided into three phases. In the first five years the Government will aggregate the whole-of-government data centre demand and establish a panel of suppliers from which agencies will be required to procure all date centre facilities and services; assist the first group of agencies to move to shared resource solutions; define the standards to be used in data centre equipment and operations so maximum efficiencies can be achieved; and work with the smaller 50 per cent agencies to consolidate their requirements into common data centre facilities.

In the second phase of the strategy, agencies will share ICT solutions and in the final phase they will adopt new technologies, processes or policies to further reduce costs.

“The primary aim of this Strategy is to deliver better services to Australians, at lower costs to the taxpayer,” Mr Tanner said.

“But we also want to encourage innovation and competition within the data centre industry.”