The department's Employment Application 3000 (EA3000) project evaluated its capacity to deliver an increasing transaction processing demand with the integration of back-end mainframe information with the Microsoft SQL Server front-end.

Brynten Taylor, the department's technical services director, said that back in May his team discovered the transaction load was going to double so "we only had the option of SQL Server 2005 64-bit edition on Windows Server 2003" to cope with the increased load.

With HP as its preferred hardware supplier, the department bought two 16-way HP Integrity systems for production and disaster recovery. The systems are configured in clustered 8-way configurations for added redundancy.

"We could have gone elsewhere, but we have been getting HP to do more 'hands-on' services," Taylor said, adding the performance of Itanium is more than adequate.

"We are evaluating 4-way AMD systems as we need to double our Web systems which consist of two 8-node clusters," he said. "The HP [Proliant] BL45p systems are 64-bit capable, which is ideal, because we want to do an SQL Server rationalization."