Johannesburg, 24 Apr 2002
A consortium comprising Datacentrix, AdvanceNet, Caldera and Compaq has been awarded a contract to provide the Department of Justice with a scaleable Compaq NonStop Unix cluster system. The system is hosted by, and runs on SITA`s network and automates one of the department`s Financial Administration Systems (FAS), essentially tracking all funds processed via the Justice system.
"The Justice Department needed a stable, customised system, which would satisfy the Department`s 99 percent uptime and scalability requirements," says Rainer Jeske, business development director of Datacentrix. "It was also necessary to provide proof of an existing skills base distributed across all nine provinces in addition to these requirements. Certificates of persons employed were issued and presented to the Department as a guarantee that we had the right resources to manage the project throughout South Africa."
In order to guarantee the Department of Justice a 99 percent uptime, the system received the necessary certification from Caldera, the operating system vendor. "When clustering several machines together, a single system image is created ensuring ease of manageability and maximising available resources. The system was configured into a full shared resource system, achieving a high level of redundancy and ensuring that uptime is maintained," explains Jeske.
The system is scaleable from two to six nodes, up to six Terabytes of data storage and runs on a ServerNet interconnect with transfer rates of 50MB per second.
The project commenced in October last year and, in early December, a pilot system was installed at SITA in Pretoria. The consortium is currently implementing three additional sites in the Western Cape, Free State and KwaZulu Natal, with a fifth being rolled out as a Disaster Recovery site.
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