The tender stipulates the SAN must have an initial capacity of 20 terabytes, scaling to 50 terabytes within the five-year life of the contract.

At the moment the AGAD uses approximately 0.5TB for its database, 0.5TB for E-mail and over 6 terabytes for file sharing.

File sharing is done between the Ice, Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate divisions, the Australian Antarctic Data Center, Antarctic Marine Living Resources and the Multimedia Unit of Information Services, who estimate annual storage requirements exceeding 7.0TB.

The SAN must support Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2000, Windows Vista Enterprise, Solaris Versions 8 and 10, Fedora core Four and Apple OS X. Enterprise system support entails VMWare Versions 2 and 3, Microsoft Exchange 2000/2007, Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005, Oracle DBMS 10.0G R2, and the Trim electronic document management system.

According to tender documents, an initial 20Tb will be integrated into the existing IT server and software environment including all relevant client licensing and monitoring solutions for an estimated 500 users.