The company set up by the Australian Government to design, build and operate its National Broadband Network (NBN) has signed a A$9.5m deal with Cisco for its data center equipment.

NBN Co has been tasked with providing infrastructure for wholesale and retail service providers which will deliver the NBN’s digital services for Australia.

The Australian government has pledged to connect 93% of all Australian premises, including those in the outback with fiber-based services, and 7% with next-generation wireless.

NBN Co’s three-year deal with Cisco includes computing, network, storage access and virtualization which will be brought into a unified system, to be used for NBN Co operating and business systems.

NBN Co only recently said it would work with hosting provider Global Switch to house hardware and software and this latest announcement shows that NBN Co is well on its way to setting up its data center operations.

Cisco said it will lead a coalition of companies, which includes EMC and VMware, for the fit out.

The solution will be built upon Vblock technology, designed by the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, which all three are members of. Cisco said this will ensure scalability within the data center, with the project expected to bring about high levels of demand that will grow over time.

Cisco’s Unified Computing System will bring together the virtualization and network resources, which in turn will lead to energy efficiencies, Cisco said.