The Ministry of Health buys half a billion Intel-based servers

The Ministry of Health allocated 486 million rubles. for the purchase of Intel-based servers and storage systems compatible with Huawei and Yadro storage systems. The purpose of the purchase was to modernize the Medical Data Processing Center.

New servers for the Ministry of Health

As CNews found out, the Ministry of Health is purchasing servers and additional data storage systems for the development of its Medical Data Processing Center (MDPC).

The center itself is a place where the telemedicine electronic registry and the central archive of medical images are located and operate. The resources of the Data Management Center make it possible to ensure a high level of availability of information systems and data, their protection and safety.

The Ministry of Health allocated 486 million rubles for modernization. The procurement tender was published on April 19, 2024. Applications are accepted until May 6. The results of the competition will be announced on May 7. The modernization is planned to be completed by August 30, 2024.

General procurement requirements

All purchased equipment must be compatible with what is already available to the Ministry of Health. These are the Inspur NF5280M5 servers based on Intel Xeon Gold, created by the Chinese company Inspur, OceanStor Dorado 5000 V6 and 5300 V5 storage systems, released by Huawei and domestic Yadro CX-1.

The Ministry of Health allocated 486 million rubles. for the purchase of servers and storage systems

The supplied equipment must be completely new, never used, not subject to repair, restoration, replacement of parts and be in free use on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Storage requirements

In addition to compatibility with the equipment available to the Ministry of Health, purchased storage systems must meet the following requirements: have at least two controllers installed in one controller chassis, which, in turn, should not occupy more than 2U in a standard 19-inch cabinet, the controller chassis must support the installation at least 36 SSD NVME drives.

All controllers must be of the same type. We expand the system capacity to at least 16 controllers and 1600 SSD drives. Data access is provided through any pair of controllers and any port.

Each pair of controllers must have at least 512 GB of RAM cache and 128 processor cores, at least 16 FC ports and 8 Ethernet ports. And all the main components are duplicated.

The ability to hot-swap disks and expand without interrupting access is required. The load on the disks should be automatically evenly distributed.

It also requires support for deduplication and data compression on SSDs, creating snapshots and clones of volumes, data replication between storage systems, and organizing a metro cluster.

Storage systems must support interaction with operating systems of the following families: Windows Server 2016/2019, CentOS Linux, SUSE Linux, VMWare and must support work with cluster systems built on the basis of these OS.

Server requirements

In the terms of reference for the purchase, the Ministry of Health indicated the technical requirements for two different servers. They must have at least two LGA-4189 sockets (Socket for Intel Xeon server processors), the processors themselves must have a power of no more than 235 W, with a base clock frequency of at least 2.6 GHz and a number of cores of at least 28 with a L3 cache memory capacity of at least 42 MB and lithography no more than 10nm. Considering these characteristics, we can conclude that the Ministry of Health needs Intel Xeon Gold 6348 processors, which they have in their current equipment.

Servers must have at least 2048 GB of DDR4 RAM with a nominal memory module frequency of at least 3200 MHz. And the volume of each installed RAM module is at least 128 GB. The high-speed memory subsystem must have at least 32 slots for installing modules, with the ability to expand the volume, and have error correction functions.