Overview
Citadel Edge upgrades the Defence Records and Information Management servers in Washington and London, from legacy hardware to a modern enterprise grade virtualised environment.
Background
In September 2024 the Washington server experienced a critical hardware failure which resulted in a multi-day outage of core services across North America. With the current heightened tempo of engagement with the United States of America, and the criticality of content management to this partnership, the disruption had a major impact on many key activities of senior military personnel. The hardware vendor had difficulty in sourcing replacement parts due to the age and location of the equipment. In the post incident review it was identified that the London server environment was in the same state, and had the same potential failure risks.
Deliverables
Citadel Edge was engaged, via an add-on project to our existing sustainment contract, to migrate the application in question from the legacy UNIX system to the Windows based platform in both Washington and London. This work consisted of undertaking the specification and design for the virtual environment and the application architecture, then perform environment build, test and certification. Additionally, the updates to the relevant security accreditation document set were also delivered.
Citadel Edge worked with Defence’s platform and infrastructure partner to deploy the updated infrastructure to the sites and install and commission the new servers and storage. The information and records application requires unique performance specifications, particularly around the storage and database subsystems, which require careful engineering and design to ensure the application is performant. Citadel Edge worked closely with all stakeholders to ensure the infrastructure configuration met these requirements. We then conducted the load and performance testing and certified that the infrastructure met the required specifications.
We also undertook all the work necessary to upgrade the application components and install the core application plus supporting monitoring and business tools onto the new server environment. A key part of the project was integrating the new servers into the system’s replicating hierarchy and migrating the data and user community.
We were also responsible for the management of the Defence change and release management process, as well as managing the key stakeholders both here in Australia and in the overseas sites.
The customer was eager to progress these activities quickly, due to the critical impact being observed regarding performance and availability within the current environment. Citadel Edge delivered both projects ahead of schedule and within budget, ensuring risks were mitigated and positive outcomes achieved. The team received senior executive level recognition for the achievements undertaken within the projects.
Outcomes
Because of Citadel Edge’s adherence to our strong engineering practices and disciplines, both sites were migrated with no issues. The projects ran smoothly with a small number of issues identified during the build and testing phases. These issues were quickly addressed by either the Citadel Edge team or other supporting staff. An example of this was a single missed item in the original firewall configuration at the other international sites, which was discovered during the pre-go-live testing period. An additional change was raised and actioned promptly to ensure there was no effect on the go-live date. These new servers were transitioned from the project team into the support framework 4 weeks after go-live. The Washington environment is now in ongoing support with the London environment transitioning in late 2025.
