The Department of Human Services (DHS) is currently undertaking a handful of technology-driven projects, and has revealed building out an "elastic" private cloud as part of its overall digital transformation.
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Integrating the Hybrid Cloud [1]
As far and fast as cloud computing is embedding itself into the enterprise, there remain many cloud-resistant applications and services.
Speaking at IBM Think in Sydney on Friday, DHS head of enterprise architecture Garrett McDonald said the private cloud sits across x86 and IBM Power Systems hardware.
"What we've been looking at in the immediate term is how do we establish a private cloud that we can stretch across hyperconverged infrastructure, bare metal x86 -- how do we stretch that across Power, and how do we stretch that onto the Z platform," McDonald said.
"Within our environment we have an elastic private cloud where we can use a single pane of glass to spin up environments and workloads on a platform where we might need horizontal scalability, vertical scalability, it could be that we'll use particular platforms for accelerated machine learning or do we need that higher performance and the ability to make concurrency and throughput go elsewhere."
The approach makes sense, given DHS has already made a "significant" investment in IBM's Power platform and also big blue's Z mainframe platform, McDonald said.
As a government department, DHS is subject to data sovereignty and other requirements from government on the accreditation of the facilities it operates, how the infrastructure is run, and even the systems