National Archives revamps server fleet

The National Archives of Australia (NAA) has flagged plans to refresh its mid-range server fleet, replacing up to 34 machines over the next three years.

The NAA is a government agency with the responsibility for looking after valuable Commonwealth government records, for example cabinet documents, departmental records, Prime Ministerial papers and more.

"The NAA requires replacement servers for databases, e-mail, file and print services, domain controllers and other functions for its national office (Parkes, ACT) computer room and its offices in capital cities around Australia for a period of three years," the agency said in tender document released last week.

The agency's move comes as two other organisations recently flagged similar mid-range server refreshes -- the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and Rural Ambulance Victoria.

The NAA has gone to market for two classes of servers. The first are smaller machines suitable for providing proxy and external e-mail gateway services to 600 concurrent users, and Web server services to 50 users.

Those boxes will have at least one dual-core CPU, with 2GB RAM, redundant gigabit Ethernet, a minimum of 200GB hard disk drives, and the ability to be shutdown and rebooted without having an operating system present.

This class of machines will need to support both Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 operating systems.

The second, more powerful class of servers will run Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases on Windows 2003, and will have two dual-core processors with 4GB of RAM and between 300GB and 1TB of disk space.

The NAA's estimated value of the contract to be signed with the successful vendor tenderer is between AU$200,000 and AU$500,000, with the contract lasting for three years from January next year.