The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is set to move its head office's data center into a CDC Data Centres colocation facility.
Under an AU$37 million (US$24.04m) agreement, RBA will be replacing and decommissioning its head office data center in Sydney, instead opting to host in a colocation data center.
The bank will also be upgrading its core infrastructure to host and support its application workloads under its CoreMod (core infrastructure modernization, previously known as CIM) program.
“The scope of CoreMod is to ensure the infrastructure supporting our critical applications is refreshed according to its planned lifecycle,” an RBA spokesperson told iTnews.
“The program allows the bank to replace and decommission the current head office data center, addressing risks arising from the 65 Martin Place reconstruction.”
The RBA headquarters are currently undergoing a major refurbishment process. For the time being, staff and operations are being run elsewhere, and CDC won the data center contract that will run until March 2034.
News that Australia's central bank would be exiting its data center was first revealed in December 2023, with the bank sending out a tender that closed in February 2024. At the time, it suggested the decommission and relocation program to take until mid-2027 to complete.
In addition to concerns about the refurbishment's impact on the data center, a report cited a previous incident as a motivating factor. "A physical incident occurred in August 2018, where the Bank experienced a disruption to the power supplying the data center at one of its sites. The power loss abruptly cut off all technology systems operating from that data center, including those supporting RITS (Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System)." Another incident occurred in October 2022 and hundreds of thousands of payments were delayed by five days when a software update to a virtual server failed.
The RBA spokesperson told iTNews that the company is currently in the stage of designing and establishing the colocation for its migration. “Through the remainder of FY 2024, our focus will be on selecting a solution partner to assist with the infrastructure design and build.”
The bank declined to share how much colocation space it will be leasing.
CDC has data centers in Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, Australia, and two in Auckland, New Zealand. The company acquired land in Sydney for a second campus in May 2023.
In March 2024, Western Sydney Airport announced that it would be using CDC Data Centres' colocation facility in Sydney for its digital air traffic control tower.
