The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) in Canberra will upgrade its fleet of more than 50 servers over the next three years.
The role of the PM&C is to provide support to the Prime Minister and to coordinate the development and implementation of government policies. Its information services branch provides ICT services to staff, the PM's office, and the office of the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security.
The IT environment supports some 450 staff at the ACT head office and a further 50 staff based at the Prime Minister's offices in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.
PM&C's network connects about 600 desktop PCs, 90 printers and there are 53 servers - 51 Dell servers running Windows Server 2003 and two Sun systems running Solaris. All servers are located in the department's head office.
An initial order of ten servers will be placed based on the department's preferred configuration.
According to departmental documents, the PM&C is investigating moving to virtual server technologies to increase its server infrastructure ROI and to provide for improved test and development environments and recovery from system failures.
PM&C's software infrastructure includes Exchange 2003, Microsoft ISA Server 2006, Active Directory, Microsoft DNS, Checkpoint VPN, Citrix Metaframe CPS4, and Microsoft Office 2003 on the desktop.
In the application space, PM&C is using SlipStream for "parliamentary correspondence", Finance1 for financial management system, TRIM for records management, the Horizon library management system, and Aurion for HR.
PM&C utilizes ITIL and PRINCE2 methodologies and is seeking a suppliers that can provide a road map for the introduction of four CPU, quad-core processors, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet dual copper network ports.
"The server configurations must be capable of running Microsoft Server 2003 and are expected to be Longhorn ready," according to the department.
PM&C has an existing outsourcing agreement with ASG Group Ltd (Exceed) for IT service desk, desktop, networking, midrange server support, and database administration services. Optus is used for voice and switchboard services, and Macquarie Telecommunications for Internet access and Web hosting services.
Selection of a preferred tenderer will occur in September 2007 with the contract to commence in October.