Government portal changes servers

By ADAM GIFFORD

The State Services Commission's E-Government Unit is moving the Government's internet portal (www.govt.nz) off a cluster of 26 Compaq servers on to two IBM iSeries boxes.

The cost of the two 801 servers, with a total 1.5 terabytes of disk storage, is estimated to be $1 million. But unit operations manager Kent Duston said because of the way Government procurement was funded, the important figure was the impact on a department's operational budget.

"It is well in the financial envelope. By the time we net it all up, we save about $250,000 over three years," he said.

"We will get 20 to 30 per cent CPU utilisation, so we can grow three or four times without investing new money."

Duston said the portal received 80,000 visitors a week.

"We also do lots of little projects, prototyping applications and developing functionality," he said.

"What was happening is every time we would do a project we would buy a new server, so the number of servers was growing but overall CPU utilisation was below 10 per cent."

The unit will hold on to the Compaq servers once the new portal switches over next month, and use them for development or hosting applications.

The E-Government Unit has a mix of Microsoft and Linux environments. The portal itself runs on Linux, apart from the Microsoft SQL Server database.

"We needed a high volume, high availability platform for the portal, plus something that would allow us to build up and tear down virtual environments without worrying about the operating system," Duston said.

A request for information from system providers brought four responses, including the winning bid from IBM partner Logical CSI. Certus proposed a Linux on Intel system; Hewlett Packard thought the job could be done on its high end PA Risc servers; and SolNet offered a solution based around Sun hardware.

Duston said what was attractive about the IBM iSeries was the partitioning capability, so it could run its native OS400 operating system, IBM's AIX flavour of Unix, Linux and Windows in the same box with the same management architecture.

The servers are hosted at Datacom's Auckland and Wellington data centres. They both have two logical partitions which can run multiple instances of Linux, as well as several PCI cards with Intel Xeon chips to run Windows.

E-Government Unit acting director Bethia Gibson said priorities for the unit over the next year included further work in developing the Secure Electronic Environment for Government agencies, including Shared WorkSpace and SecureMail.

It has asked for funding in the 2004 budget for development of electronic authentication. It also works on the architectures, standards and policies needed by agencies to support electronic service delivery.