Govt's super dept slips into server stream
The federal government's superannuation administration agency ComSuper will attempt to streamline the purchase of back-office servers through appointing a panel of hardware providers.
Canberra-based ComSuper has more than 400 staff and is responsible for day to day administration of the government's public sector and defence superannuation schemes.
The agency this week went to tender for vendors to supply its long-term needs for low-end and mid-range servers and storage area networking infrastructure.
"One of the goals of this Request for Tender process is to enable ComSuper to streamline the procurement of server environment infrastructure in the short, medium and long-terms," the agency wrote in tender documents.
"This procurement activity is in line with ComSuper's realignment strategy of standardised IT equipment."
The agency's need for servers stems from its practice of implementing "a significant number" of online services to its government customers. In addition, ComSuper provides in-house authentication and access control, messaging, identity management and database services, in addition to corporate applications and storage space.
ComSuper has built its online services using Oracle database software running on Sun Microsystems mid-range servers, and separately, IBM's DB2 database running on IBM's OS/400 operating system. The agency also runs Dell PowerEdge x86 servers running Novell Netware and Windows. Storage is provided through a Dell/EMC CX700 storage area network.
More specifically, ComSuper currently utilises, for example, Sun's V880 (with 8 CPUs at 750MHz each) and 420r (with 2 CPUs at 450MHz) machines. Dell's PowerEdge 2850 and 2950 servers are also in use. These are both dual-CPU boxes, and ComSuper will continue to buy servers with multiple CPUs in its next generation of servers.
For that next generation, ComSuper will add Novell's SUSE Linux into the mix. It will continue to use the AMD/Intel x86 architecture, as well as IBM's POWER and Sun's SPARC chip platforms.
Government agencies are prohibited from commenting on current Requests for Tender.