Australia's national authority for signal intelligence and information security, the Defence Signals Directorate, will install an additional 50 servers to facilitate the operations of its computer network vulnerability team.

The DSD computer network vulnerability team, part of the information security group, conducts vulnerability assessments, IT security incident response, research and development, and provides advice and assistance on ICT security policy.

The team requires "significant" IT server infrastructure for these and other operations.

From April to May 2008 the DSD will acquire 30 1U servers with dual 2.6GHz quad-core processors and "no less than 8GB" of memory. RAID SAS hard disks and dual redundant power supply is also required.

Also on the shopping list are 12 1U dual core 2.0GHz Intel Xeon "or similar" systems with at least 1GB of memory.

For more storage-intensive operations, five 2U dual quad-core servers will be purchased with "no less than" 3TB of SAS HDD storage.

The most mission-critical system to be purchased is a VMware ESX server cluster, consisting of three, dual 3GHz quad-core servers with as much as 16GB of memory in a 2U form factor.

Each machine in the cluster will have four gigabit network interfaces and Fibre Channel connectivity to direct attached storage or a SAN with at least 10GB of capacity.

All systems are to be delivered to the DSD offices in Russell, Canberra.

Specific operating system details were not released but the contract requires tenderers to provide details of any open source licences software for any open source software that may be provided.

In addition to providing information security support and advice to federal and state authorities, DSD's information security group also provides assistance with cryptography and communications technologies.