Innovation department commits to Oracle hardware upgrade

Innovation Minister, Senator Kim Carr.

Oracle’s hardware business continues to be popular among Federal Government agencies with the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) looking to refresh its existing SPARC Solaris systems.

The department uses a number of Sun Fire V440 systems, which are at the end of their effective lives and will be replaced by Oracle M4000 servers.

Oracle Enterprise M4000 servers are classed as a mid-range system and are targeted at enterprise application and scientific and engineering workloads.

DISSR is looking to acquire two M4000 systems, with an option for a third machine, all with attached storage arrays. The systems will be used to run Oracle RDBMS and other Solaris software and for disaster recovery and general system testing. M4000s have been chosen to maintain a high degree of compatibility with current production hardware, according to the department.

The project would be managed by Craig Pennifold, the department’s CIO and head of its “eBusiness” division responsible for online e-business services, IT operations, IT systems, and “VANguardand Infrastructure”. Pennifold reports directly to the deputy secretary Sue Weston. The department is overseen by innovation minister, Senator Kim Carr.

Earlier this year the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) announced its intention to expand its Oracle hardware and software installation.

Oracle previously announced it scale back the number of server systems in the Sun hardware portfolio.

At DISSR applications include mathematical modelling software and data storage for scientific instruments. If a third system is purchased it will be used to form a test cluster with the second machine.

The specifications for the two main production systems are dual 2.66GHz SPARC64 VII+ CPUs, 32GB of RAM, a minimum of 2 terabytes of useable fibre channel disk space and the Solaris 10 (64-bit) operating system with the ZFS file system. The RAM must be configured to allow for future growth to 64GB without replacing any existing components.

Both systems are required to have fully-redundant components without any single point of failure.

For the potential cluster, an Oracle cluster license for two nodes will also be purchased. There will be a 16 kilometre separation between the nodes and they will be configured as a Solaris Cluster utilising an existing quorum server.

The systems will be installed at the DIISR offices in Canberra.

Follow Rodney Gedda on Twitter: @rodneygedda

Follow CIO Australia on Twitter: @CIO_Australia

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