The Department of Social Services is preparing to ‘hyperconverge’ its infrastructure.

One of the largest federal departments say it is bringing all its workloads together minimise data centre costs.

Social Services is looking to set up a new arrangement around new x86-based and VMware compatible infrastructure to replace its in-house storage and computing infrastructure.

The ‘hyperconverged’ infrastructure should eventually host both the department’s protected and unclassified workloads and data for “efficient, effective and economical use of public money on a whole of life basis”.

Due to security issues, the hardware and related software and services will be required “to be certified by an IRAP assessor to hold data at the protected level”.

But the hardware will also be used for unclassified workloads, as “DSS would like to run both Protected and Unclassified workloads on the same hardware”.

“The services should be capable of scaling beyond the initial implementation size of the protected workloads to a future state that would include the unclassified workloads,” tender documents state.

DSS currently runs “each application or workload in a single data centre facility”, so its preference is for infrastructure solutions “that do not span data centre facilities”.

“In the event of a failure in one data centre facility, a workload will be started in a different data centre facility,” the department said.

“The objective of this model is to ensure any failure of a component in one data centre facility does not propagate or affect operations [at] another data centre facility.”

“Solutions therefore that provide a single control plane and will continue to function if a data centre fails are preferred.”