Victoria's rural ambulance service has outlined plans to install at least 25 new mid-range servers in locations throughout the state, with the project to commence as early as January next year.
Rural Ambulance Victoria (RAV) services around 1.4 million people in country Victoria -- an area of around 215,000 square kilometres.
"A number of new computer systems are due to be introduced within RAV, which will require equipment, and a significant number of our existing servers (provided and maintained by Dell) have reached the end of their usable life, requiring refreshment," the group wrote in tender documents issued this month.
A RAV spokesperson had not commented by the time of publication on what new computer systems were being introduced. However RAV is known to have a substantial installation of Oracle software.
RAV will identify a supplier for its new servers in late November, and take delivery of the first batch of hardware in mid-January. The machines will be installed at RAV's Ballarat head office, in addition to other locations around the state.
Initially the group will require some 24 servers, although this could eventually reach 35. Storage and backup systems are also required. RAV has specified its servers must have the following configuration:
- 2 X Dual-core Intel Pentium Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs
- 2GB installed RAM, expandable to 16GB
- 19" rack form factor, 2RU rack unit height
- 3 X PCI express I/O expansion slots
- 4 X 146GB internal SCSI hard disks, RAID supported
- Minimum of 4 internal hard disk bays
- CDRW/DVD combo drive
- 2 X on-board gigabit Ethernet ports, supporting redundancy and aggregation
- One PCI express gigabit Ethernet port
The servers must be certified to run Windows Server 2003, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.
