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The Federal Treasury is purchasing servers on the RISC architecture worth ₽780 million

According to Kommersant, the Federal Treasury, against the background of possible technological sanctions, is conducting state procurement of servers based on the RISC architecture for 780 million rubles.

According to the tender documentation, the RF Treasury Operations Support Center is purchasing 16 RISC servers (32 cores, SMP, 3.9 GHz) with installation and configuration services.

The government procurement documentation also states that the department uses IBM Power 770 servers, as well as solutions from a domestic developer of data storage systems and Yadro servers.

According to the TOR, the server hardware must be compatible with the AIX 6.1 OS operating system and the management console of the department's existing fleet of fault-tolerant Yadro P1-70A mission-critical servers on IBM POWER8 processors on the RISC architecture, and also support the migration of software-independent partitions from them. New servers are needed by the department for tasks that require increased performance. In fact, the TOR of the purchase states that the processors in the servers must be equivalent to IBM POWER8 or better.

In addition to purchasing RISC servers, the Federal Treasury is purchasing blade servers and storage systems for 740 million rubles to replace the existing fleet of IBM BladeCenter HS22 on Xeon X5667 and IBM BladeCenter PS701 on Power7, as well as Hitachi AMS 2500 storage systems.

The publication's experts explained that now there are no domestic analogues for such a purchase, and the contractor will have to supply solutions on IBM Power RISC processors.

Industry representatives reminded the publication that the production of domestic processors based on the RISC-V architecture is only at an early stage. In November 2019, Yadro bought out 51% of the Russian developer of microprocessor cores based on the RISC-V architecture, Syntacore. In July 2021, Yadro, together with Rostec, began developing a processor based on the RISC-V architecture, but it will not be completed until 2025.

In December 2021, a Yadro representative said that the company expects in 2022 a significant increase in orders for domestic servers and storage systems from the critical infrastructure of the Russian Federation, including government agencies, defense industry enterprises, energy, fuel and nuclear industries, transport and the financial sector ( banks, other credit organizations and funds, stock exchanges). In 2022, these companies must use at least 50% of domestic software in their systems, and also begin the transition to Russian servers.

According to the Law “On the Security of Critical Information Infrastructure” (N 187-FZ) and government proposals, critical information infrastructure facilities must switch to Russian software by January 1, 2024 and to Russian IT equipment by January 1, 2025.

The Federal Treasury is purchasing servers on the RISC architecture worth ₽780 million