Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH

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According to a current study conducted by Cap Gemini for the EU Commission, Austria is the clear European champion in e-government. The results reflect a series of projects implemented by Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ), the main IT services provider to the Austrian government, in close cooperation with Sun Microsystems. Since 2002, Austria has moved up from eleventh place to first place in the annual study, which measures the success of governments in achieving complete end-to-end transactional capabilities and moving citizen services online.

A majority of the e-government applications deployed within the Austrian government is designed, implemented and operated by BRZ. This includes Portal Austria, the central access point for e-government services, the rollout of a digital e-card health insurance system, and an e-customs solution. All of these systems were implemented with Sun as part of a long-standing strategic relationship.

Overall, BRZ is deploying more than 160 Sun servers running Solaris Operating System. The e-card project, launched in 2005, uses more than 40 Sun servers to process citizen access to health insurance information and other government services through a Java-based identification card.

The e-customs solution runs a central database application for customs handling on two redundantly configured Sun Fire E6900 servers, each with 24 UltraSPARC IV+ dual core processors. Due to the end-to-end hardware redundancy and up to four fault-tolerant dynamic system domains, the E6900 servers and the Solaris 10 Operating System offer BRZ the highest levels of availability and flexibility combined with optimum system utilization. The high-performance systems also run a central asset database, a document management system, and a planning tool for the Ministry of Finance. BRZ is now planning to consolidate applications running across a 20-node AIX server platform onto the two E6900 servers.

BRZ also deployed Sun Fire T2000 servers, replacing four Linux servers with each of the Sun systems. The T2000 servers are based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor and set new standards for power efficiency and datacenter space conservation. The processors have up to eight cores, each of which can handle four independent threads. The cores, with a rate of 1.2 gigahertz, might seem slow, but they deliver five times greater performance than competitive servers with 80 percent lower power consumption due to the multithreaded architecture. The processors also produce less waste heat, which reduces cooling costs.

BZR reports that the T2000 servers are especially well-suited to portal applications and Web tier consolidation projects. In addition, the T2000 servers can be partitioned to support multiple applications for smaller customers on a single cost-effective server.

BRZ is now in discussions with Sun on providing servers for a planned project in the Austrian Ministry of Education that will provide more than 120,000 teachers with access to an e-learning solution. In addition, BRZ is evaluating Sun servers for a revamp of its SAP applications environment. With help from Sun and BRZ, Austria intends to continue to set the standard for E-Government and service to its citizens.