Robert Galea

For any organisation to be relevant and to provide value to its customers, continual investment is essential. This is especially true for ICT organisations, given the high rate of technological change (new functionalities and features) and high rate of obsolescence. MITA is no exception to this and over the years it has invested heavily to ensure its systems, applications and infrastructure remain current, meet Government’s ever increase demand on ICT and provide value to its users.

Over the past four years, MITA has invested heavily in its main infrastructural pillar. The following is a brief outline of the major investments that were undertaken.

The Malta Government NETwork (MAGNET)

The 12-year contract with GO plc, for the provision of fibre based Wide Area Network connectivity was due to expire in the 4th quarter of 2016. This contract provided to the connectivity of circa 130 Government sites (Ministries, Departments and Entities) to the Malta Government Network and in turn to MITA’s Data Centre in order to access systems, applications and services provided by MITA.

In 2014, MITA published a Tender for the continuity of these services, covering the sites in Malta and Gozo, together with enhancements that were then required, namely the greater flexibility in the bandwidths provided, coupled with higher bandwidths than previous, to meet the continued growing demands by Government and the inclusion of the provision of Internet bandwidth. The tender was awarded to GO plc and work started in the provisioning of the new fibre based network.

The build phase was completed in late 2015 and the migration of all sites on the ‘old’ network were seamlessly completed by the target date of end third quarter of 2016. By the end of the first quarter of 2017 there were around 160 fibre based connections. It should be noted that the total over the seven-year term of this contract is expected to be circa €2,000,000, notwithstanding, on a like-for-like basis the rates per connection are considerably lower than previous, presenting significant cost savings to MITA and Government.

Also, related to the Malta Government Network, in April 2015 MITA published an open tender for the procurement of a Secure Connectivity Solution, made of a range of firewall-based networking equipment, both for the Core Network within MITA’s Data Centre and for the Wide Area Network to be located at the various Ministries, Departments and Entities connected to the Malta Government Network. The aim of the project was to enhance and increase the level of security, already present, of the entire Malta Government Network, mainly through encryption. The complete solution would also allow for a homogeneous approach, thus simplifying the complexities associated with encryption and security in general, while increasing flexibility and operational efficiencies and effectiveness.

After a lengthy and thorough evaluation process, the tender was awarded in November 2015 to ICT Solutions at a total contract value of circa €1,700,000 for a fiveyear term.

The implementation started in early 2016 and by the end of the first quarter of 2017 nearly all fibre-based connections have been installed with the new firewalls and in parallel work started on providing the new firewalls for the 300+ broadband connections. The central core firewalls have also been implemented within MITA’s two Data Centres and works are underway to bring them into full production by migrating the numerous services onto them. It is anticipated that the entire implementation will be completed by end 2017.

Storage Infrastructure

Demand for IT storage is ever-present and continually increasing year-on-year. This is also true for MITA that hosts most of Government’s IT applications and services. As IT applications and services become richer in features and functionality so increase the IT storage demands. Another consideration for the ever-increasing demand for more storage is the fact that applications and services are storing more and more data and keeping it for longer – data is rarely deleted, purged or ‘cleaned’ for what is no longer necessary or no longer provides value.

In May 2014, MITA published an open Tender for the procurement of two storage arrays, one the failover of the other, for redundancy and business continuity purposes. Essentially, such arrays are large racks composed of many hard-disks of varying capacity managed with sophisticated software to compress data and maximise the capacity available, along with rich features providing replication, high-availability, extremely fast access and security. The aim of these storage arrays was to get an approximate storage capacity of close to 200TB.

The Tender was awarded in July 2015, to SG Solutions, at a total value, covering 7 years, of circa €450,000. The two arrays were fully configured and commissioned in the production / live environment by the end of 2015, inclusive of the data migration from the previous ‘older’ systems.

Backup Infrastructure

The backup methodology employed by MITA has not changed over the past 25 years, albeit for some minor exceptions. Also, the current tape backup infrastructure has been in operation for the past nine years and is due for replacement. Over the past five years, since the deployment and growth of MITA’s virtualisation platform, disk backups have been introduced to replace the daily tape backups. However, weekly and monthly backups are still taken directly to tape.

The continual, rapid growth of the number of new servers and the growth of data on the current servers is starting to place excessive pressure on the management of tape media. Furthermore, the time available for the backup window is constantly shrinking, with services expected to be available 24 x 7.

Given the scenario above, the continued data growth of current systems, the continuing trend of hosting more servers / systems, including those to be procured through the Converge Programme (both Vertical and Horizontal Building Blocks) and the fact that the current hardware (tape libraries and disk arrays) are due for a technology refresh, it is believed that this is the opportune time to overhaul MITA’s backup regime and infrastructure.

MITA requires an Enterprise grade backup Solution that is fitfor-purpose for the complexities and capacity to back up the 1,200 plus servers and their applications (and to cater for their growth and new systems to be hosted in the future).

In April 2017, MITA published an open Tender for the procurement of two Enterprise Diskbased Backup Arrays, one the failover of the other, for redundancy and business continuity purposes. The total estimated value, over 7 years is expected to be around €2,700,000, with around €1,700,000 (the capital investment) being funded through EU Funds from the Converge Programme.

The intention is to have these Enterprise Disk-based Backup Arrays fully implemented, commissioned and in operation by end 2017.

With these strategic investments, MITA is sure to keep providing value to Government and the Public Service users in general by offering the latest infrastructure services supporting the systems and applications used across Government.

Written by Robert Galea, MITA Head of Infrastructure Services Department