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Uni of WA picks Amcom in $9m cloud deal

The University of Western Australia (UWA) has signed an agreement with Amcom over the weekend, which will see it pay $9 million over three years for infrastructure as a service cloud services.
Written by Suzanne Tindal, Contributor

The University of Western Australia (UWA) has signed an agreement with Amcom over the weekend, which will see it pay $9 million over three years for infrastructure as a service cloud services.

Amcom will provide hosted servers, storage and back-up at its datacentres in Perth, with the hundreds of servers and over 400TB of storage connected to the university via Amcom's 10-gigabit fibre network.

The university will be able to scale how much infrastructure it needs up or down using a self-service portal, which the telco provides through a partnership with BlueFire.

The university nominates a lead administrator, who can delegate authority to departments to administer their own infrastructure, according to Richard Whiting, Amcom's group executive for Networks and Technology. There will be soft limits on a departmental level for how much infrastructure the university can consume, Whiting said. The $9 million figure was a minimum, the executive said, which would likely increase as the university scaled up its consumption of the cloud service.

Amcom has two datacentres in Perth: one that it gained through its acquisition of PeopleTel; and another that it built in 2001.

"As UWA's requirements increase, it is vital for us to strategically plan to provide our students, academics and researchers all the computing power and storage to meet their future needs," Dr Mary Davies, UWA's librarian and director (information management) said in a statement.

"Amcom is ready to deliver the hosted services we require now, and, most important, our data is stored in Perth using dedicated infrastructure (single tenant) under a private hosted services agreement. This puts us in the forefront of hosted computer and storage, and frees us to concentrate on value added support for teaching, learning and research."

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