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 the Network Upgrade Projects to ensure that the core ICT environments of Defence would not be impacted by the upgrade.

In parallel with the Australia-wide site
survey, Insitec architects designed a new Oracle Database and Solaris Unix
implementation to move the extremely large data holdings to the new servers while streamlining overall system performance. As an example, database tables with multi-billion rows of data were managed and re-designed to improve performance.

Insitec installed the new servers at each site, moved the data holdings from the old servers to the new, and tested each server individually – all within stringent outage windows so as not to impact Defence’s business outcomes.

Through extensive testing and performance management, Insitec delivered outstanding system performance improvements.