Rio Tinto is migrating key IT systems back to Australian data centres under a major regional centralisation push. The mining giant has been working on a data centre migration project in the Asia Pacific for about 18 months. In that time, the company has migrated SAP and other business systems used by its Coal Australia subsidiary from data centres in the United States back to Australia. Rio is also in the process of consolidating some 50,000 Exchange mailboxes into centralised data centres - which again includes facilities in Australia.

The migration of SAP systems back to Australia, in particular, raised questions of a strategic change at Rio Tinto. As late as mid-2008, the company migrated some older SAP systems hosted in an IBM data centre in Sydney to new infrastructure in one of its global data centres in Chicago. Other Rio Tinto global data centres are located in San Diego, Europe and Australia.

Source: IT News

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