Objective T7 Upgrade Defence Chief Information Officer Group The Objective T7 upgrade project was commissioned by the Department of Defence Chief Information Officer Group (CIOG) for the Directorate of Information Systems Sustainment. The project upgraded more than 50 hardware servers at regional Australian Defence sites and core data centres, while exponentially improving system performance. Australia-wide, more than 50 servers required a hardware refresh at both regional locations and core data centres. The challenge The Australian Department of Defence needed to upgrade the fleet of servers responsible for documents and records management on its protected network. Insitec was tasked with designing and implementing an extensive upgrade to the Objective T7 system, which comprises servers in every Australian state and territory. Insitec partnered with Accenture to design, build and test the new system. The Insitec team consisted of architects, infrastructure engineers, database administrators, test managers, testers and Unix specialists, with Accenture providing project management services. Insitec’s infrastructure engineers surveyed each site to ensure that the facilities (power, cooling, rack space etc) would support the hardware upgrade. The server hardware upgrade necessitated the operating system and database upgrades to be completed in parallel. This was complicated by the business critical nature of the system and its very large data holdings, which meant that outage tolerances were extremely small. Our solution Insitec worked closely with other Defence providers within CIOG, including the Centralised Processing project, the End User Compute project and theNetwork Upgrade Projects to ensure that the core ICT environments of Defencewould not be impacted by the upgrade. In parallel with the Australia-wide sitesurvey, Insitec architects designed a new Oracle Database and Solaris Uniximplementation to move the extremely large dataholdings to the newservers while streamlining overall system performance. As an example, database tables with multi-billionrows of data were managed and re-designed to improve performance. Insitec installed the new servers at each site, moved the data holdings from theold servers to the new, and tested each serverindividually – all within stringent outage windowsso as not to impact Defence’s business outcomes. Through extensive testing and performancemanagement, Insitec delivered outstandingsystem performance improvements. The result Insitec surveyed and installed hardware at over 30 regional Defence sites Australia-wide delivering exponential performance increases for Defence. While the exact metrics for the system are classified, one user group highlightedthe magnitude of the system performance gains citing that a team ofadministrative staff in a regional centre regularly searched for information within the document system. Prior to the upgrade, it was common for the search to take 20-30 minutes. Post the upgrade, the search returned results within 10 seconds. < Go Back
The Objective T7 upgrade project was commissioned by the Department of Defence Chief Information Officer Group (CIOG) for the Directorate of Information Systems Sustainment. The project upgraded more than 50 hardware servers at regional Australian Defence sites and core data centres, while exponentially improving system performance. Australia-wide, more than 50 servers required a hardware refresh at both regional locations and core data centres. The challenge The Australian Department of Defence needed to upgrade the fleet of servers responsible for documents and records management on its protected network. Insitec was tasked with designing and implementing an extensive upgrade to the Objective T7 system, which comprises servers in every Australian state and territory. Insitec partnered with Accenture to design, build and test the new system. The Insitec team consisted of architects, infrastructure engineers, database administrators, test managers, testers and Unix specialists, with Accenture providing project management services. Insitec’s infrastructure engineers surveyed each site to ensure that the facilities (power, cooling, rack space etc) would support the hardware upgrade. The server hardware upgrade necessitated the operating system and database upgrades to be completed in parallel. This was complicated by the business critical nature of the system and its very large data holdings, which meant that outage tolerances were extremely small. Our solution Insitec worked closely with other Defence providers within CIOG, including the Centralised Processing project, the End User Compute project and theNetwork Upgrade Projects to ensure that the core ICT environments of Defencewould not be impacted by the upgrade. In parallel with the Australia-wide sitesurvey, Insitec architects designed a new Oracle Database and Solaris Uniximplementation to move the extremely large dataholdings to the newservers while streamlining overall system performance. As an example, database tables with multi-billionrows of data were managed and re-designed to improve performance. Insitec installed the new servers at each site, moved the data holdings from theold servers to the new, and tested each serverindividually – all within stringent outage windowsso as not to impact Defence’s business outcomes. Through extensive testing and performancemanagement, Insitec delivered outstandingsystem performance improvements. The result Insitec surveyed and installed hardware at over 30 regional Defence sites Australia-wide delivering exponential performance increases for Defence. While the exact metrics for the system are classified, one user group highlightedthe magnitude of the system performance gains citing that a team ofadministrative staff in a regional centre regularly searched for information within the document system. Prior to the upgrade, it was common for the search to take 20-30 minutes. Post the upgrade, the search returned results within 10 seconds.