The shared IT service centre for Germany's federal government (ZIVIT) has awarded a 10 million euro support contract for open source software, it announced on 8 October. The four-year contract was won by CGI, a large ICT service provider. The contract is for maintenance and management of a high availability Linux cluster running databases, file and network services and backups systems, used by the Federal Ministry of Finance.

The contract does not signal a strategic change in the federal government IT strategy, says a spokesperson for the Zentrum für Informationsverarbeitung und Informationstechnik. “The German public administration uses open source based solutions. The contract includes support services for the technical operation of these systems.”

In May, ZIVIT, published a request for an ICT service specialist to help maintain and manage its Linux cluster. ZIVIT is looking for assistance to optimise performance of servers running Suse and Ubuntu Linux, MySQL database systems, the Apache web server and the Apache Tomcat and JBoss Java application servers. The open source solutions are combined with proprietary solutions, including for databases and storage.

The IT service centre also expects recommendations on how to further develop its data centre.

Smooth operator

The contract should ensure the smooth operation of some 80 x86 servers in the Berlin data centre, on which ZIVIT runs 40 business applications that are used by nearly 2500 civil servants at the Federal Ministry of Finance.

The security of ZIVIT’s open source systems are managed by using Nagios. Configuration management is done using Puppet.

ZIVIT expects the service provider to be experienced in Samba for file and print services, proxy server Squid and mail server Postfix. It is also looking for expertise in DRDB, software to manage Linux clusters, and cluster storage solutions Gluster FS and Ceph.

More information:

Tender award announcement
ZIVIT’s request for open source services (in German)
OSOR news item
OSOR news item