With an existing mixture of mainframe and proprietary Unix systems, the Australian Department of Defense has chosen the x86 and IA64 architectures over Sun Microsystems Inc."s Sparc for its new A$450,000 security management application.

With a network accessed daily by more than 70,000 military personnel and contractors, Defense expects the automated event notification system to reduce manual operations.

As reported by Computerworld Australia in May, Defense procured Tier-3"s Behavior Anomaly Detection (BAD) software, dubbed Huntsman, to provide a holistic and security solution across the department"s network, operating systems and applications.

With a choice of Microsoft Windows Server on Intel or Solaris on Sparc for Huntsman, Defense opted for Wintel. SQL Server 64-bit edition has also been chosen over Oracle, the only other database supported by the application.

A Defense spokesperson said the selection criteria for a security information management product did not specify any particular hardware platform and required each vendor to make recommendations for suitable hardware based on the projected event load - events per second.

The infrastructure for the Tier-3 solution consists of Intel Itanium 2-based Hewlett-Packard Integrity rx7620 four-way servers and Xeon-based HP Proliant DL580 four-way and DL380 two-way servers.

HP was chosen over other Intel server vendors to satisfy "existing Defense supplier and contractual arrangements," the Defense spokesperson said.

The spokesperson would not reveal hardware costs but did say the equipment purchased is part of the total project.

"Most vendors provided a solution comprising either Sparc-Oracle or Intel-SQL Server," the Defense spokesperson said. "Intel-SQL Server was also the recommended solution from Tier 3, based on the projected event rate."

This latest commitment to Intel comes in the wake of a Xeon-based Unisys ES7000 mainframe-class machine bought to run a new PeopleSoft and Oracle HR self-service system last year.

The BAD software works by using host-based agents to collect system event information from multiple data sources. The agents can also monitor and control processes, monitor system memory, and disk space utilization, according to the company.