The Reserve Bank of Australia has initiated the design phase of its core infrastructure modernisation (CIM) program and is seeking a consultant to assist with the process.
The RBA has issued an approach to market for a consultant who can review and validate the technology designs, and develop an “overall infrastructure solution design” that is compatible with the bank’s existing technology stack, so its core infrastructure and applications can operate with minimal disruption.
The modernisation program was announced in December 2023, and involves a new co-located data centre and the retirement of the current head office data centre, as well as designing the new core infrastructure and migrating the existing workloads to the new core.
The documents attached to the latest approach to market reveal the magnitude of the task facing the designer of the new core.
The designer will have to ensure that “all customer applications” and all core infrastructure services meet or exceed the current capabilities, in terms of performance, resilience, availability, and security.
A modernised core should have the attributes required to deliver “resilience, security and observability”.
The document states that some of its current core infrastructure is “end-of-life and obsolete”.
The RBA’s current environment consists of more than 420 physical servers hosting Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines; 7.7 PB of storage, more than 700 physical and logical Cisco devices, and 300 other networking devices for functions such as load balancing.
The designer will also have to provide solutions for services such as DNS, Active Directory, Network Time Protocol, remote access, identity and access management, DHCP, PKI, backup and recovery, monitoring and alerting, and archive services.
The approach to market anticipates the design process to commence in June 2024.
The modernisation program was prompted by a Deloitte review into a November 2022 outage caused by a failed software update.