The Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS) is to establish a panel for the supply of servers as part of an ongoing server consolidation and migration to a virtualised environment project.
The panel will be used to acquire up to 150 servers over the next three years to support the project.
It will also be used to supply servers to sister agencies the Department of the Senate, and the Department of the House of Representatives.
“DPS is in the process of consolidating to a smaller number of centralised and highly resilient servers, with adoption of a virtualised environment based on VMware to host applications,” DPS documents on the panel read. “Demand for new servers is expected to be met by either increasing the capacity of the virtual environment or by increasing the number of servers or both.”
The panel will be used to source a range of servers – small application or file servers with included local storage, non-virtual application server with SAN-attached storage, and virtualisation platform, with SAN-attached storage.
It will also include any infrastructure to accommodate and manage the server range such as racks, KVM switches, rack-based UPS, cable management features, and rack monitor units.
According to the DPS, each server configuration must be capable of running Microsoft Windows Server 2008, and/or participate in a VMWare ESXi environment. The DPS documents did not specify a preferred vendor or form factor.