The mainframe natural environment underpinning Australia’s vast estate of mission-essential immigration and cargo devices is established for a after in a era overhaul.
The Section of Property Affairs has uncovered programs for a “mainframe workload modernisation and optimisation” job to deal with areas of increasing risks and drive down operational expenses.
The job, uncovered on Friday, will think about the “future operation” of the department’s “IBM mainframe infrastructure” and how its “critical computing workloads” could possibly be transformed.
The mainframe at present hosts a variety of “mission-critical” traveller, cargo and trade devices, which function 24 hrs a day and for that reason “require really substantial amounts of dependability and availability”.
Property Affairs will use the proposed enhance to deal with a variety of “perceived issues and workforce risks with the at present shipping of companies supplied by the mainframe platform”.
One of these issues is the department’s ongoing battle to uncover expert staff to switch or increase its ageing mainframe workforce – a “significant proportion” of which are approaching retirement.
“This has the likely to leave the department in a posture wherever there is insufficient staff to proficiently function the current mainframe based environments,” RFI doc state.
The department said this had the likely to expose it to “some operational chance if even a little variety of staff were to depart at close to the identical time”.
“Due to the lowering possibilities and/or absence of enthusiasm for mainframe schooling, the department is getting it tricky to switch departing staff, building it increasingly tricky to thoroughly guidance the Department’s essential apps,” it said.
Property Affairs is also expanding shifting towards “contemporary advancement methodologies” to reduce the time amongst “development to solution deployment for apps changes”.
It has presently begun laying the groundwork to re-architect components of its main devices working with smaller – possibly cloud-hosted – elements by experimenting with AWS and DevOps at the periphery.
Opening up monolithic and mainframe-based devices with APIs and refactoring some present apps to run in the cloud were just some of the jobs regarded as at the time.
While not explicitly stated, the department has also seasoned a surge in system outages in new months, most just lately in December.
“Unscheduled system outages have a substantial impact for front line ABF officers in the effectiveness of their each day duties, RFI files state.
The department said it will use the RFI to achieve a superior knowing of “what solutions at present exist for porting and/or redeveloping mainframe-based devices to up to date platforms”.
It anticipates working with responses to “assess appropriate and rising methodologies and systems that could influence the advancement of ability necessities for the project”.
This “may or might not consist of the ongoing procedure of a mainframe platform”, the department said.
“The Section is giving no way on the probable instructions that can be taken in ‘modernising’ the mainframe workload,” the RFI states.
In addition to shifting to a extra up to date operating natural environment and lowering chance from an ageing workforce, the department will use the job to lessen expenses and boost efficiency.
Mainframe working expenses at present will increase as more million instructions per second (MIPS) necessities for typical business enterprise processing is demanded.
“Under present preparations the department is fully commited to a mainframe hardware refresh just about every 5 years. These refreshes impose a substantial economical load on the Section,” the RFI states.
“The choice of extending the operational life of the hardware to distribute the price tag more than a lengthier time period is created tricky by the manufacturer’s schedules for Finish of Income Lifetime (EOSL) and Finish of Support (EOS).”
The department’s mainframe at present operates “all environments with an allocation 7700 MIPS”.
