ItalTel partners with Cisco to win data centre contract for Italian army
Fri 10 Oct 2014

ItalTel has been awarded a 2.5mn euro contract for a new data centre for the Italian army (L’Esercito Italiano), which will also involve the creation of an ‘Esercito 2’ portal.
The program seeks to develop and modernise EINET, the infrastructure of the Italian army, establishing virtualisation procedures on new hardware, with on-going support commitments. The new infrastructure will create a network between the headquarters of the army in Rome and the networks of all army barracks.
The new portal, ‘Army Portal 2’ (‘Portale Esercito 2.0’) will provide additional functionality, increasing military access to the internet and provisioning a platform for data backup and replication.
The new contract continues ItalTel’s parthership with Cisco, which has seen the creation of new and advanced data centres for the Italian military over the last few years, representing a practical simplification of what had been a convoluted and difficult-to-support patchwork of solutions.
The new initiative supports 11 other ‘mini’ data centre installations realised or upgraded in recent years, which leverage cloud computing and virtualisation techniques whilst ensuring security and uptime assurances.
Italtel CEO Stefano Pileri said [Italian]: “We are proud to be able to provide our skills and know-how to the Italian Army. We have always been able to offer a deep knowledge of telecommunications networks, but we have also been able to evolve into a company with important ICT strengths…the award of this important contract demonstrates our commitment to providing the public and private technological tools which are necessary in order to ensure growth.”