Competition watchdog seeks blade servers

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is looking to purchase additional blade servers and associated products to support a range of infrastructure projects in its Canberra and Melbourne data centres.

The ACCC said it intends to purchase two blade chassis and between fifteen and twenty blade servers.

"The ACCC is looking to install Citrix XenServer 5.5 and XenDesktop 3 farms on blade server infrastructure in both Canberra and Melbourne data centres," the ACCC said in tender documents.

It noted that "tenderers should recognise that the ACCC already has an investment in HP blade infrastructure", suggesting it wanted to stick to a HP-centric server environment.

The ACCC told iTnews the idea behind purchasing blade servers wasn't because of space requirements, but cooling.

ACCC's Geoff Hunter said that green IT projects were "something that was on everyone's plate".

"[Blade servers] are better on power and better on density - which relates to heating," he said. "It gives you a lot of computing power in a small space."

Applications for the tender close October 6.