New Zealand"s Ministry of Health is going back to Unix for its mission-critical applications.

"Windows can?t support what we do, and its management controls aren?t consistent with a data centre operation," says CIO Warwick Sullivan. "We?ve got a very peaky processing cycle and we were sometimes running out of resources."

The Ministry has spent more than NZ$3 million (US$2.2 million) buying a range of IBM kit. It has purchased three P5/70s, three storage area networks and replaced its core 3Comm network with Cisco, all from IBM, after going to a selected tender.

It has also bought IBM X series 455 Notes servers after originally planning to put Notes on Unix on the 5/70.

"We found we couldn?t do that because IBM doesn?t certify Notes running on AIX," Sullivan says.

The project is being rolled out over the next six months. Infrastructure manager Nick Mair, who is managing the project, says the move to the SANs is the most radical part, and that the rest is replacement of aged IBM servers.