Potential suppliers of servers running on Russian Elbrus processors have amicably ignored the 480-million tender of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for their supply. "Iron" was planned to be used to fix traffic violations in Moscow.
As CNews found out, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) could not get servers on Russian processors from the Elbrus line for a system for fixing traffic violations in Moscow. On the eve of the thematic auctions, it turned out that there were no people willing to transfer the necessary hardware to the ministry.
Recall that the tender for the supply of 133 servers with domestic chips was announced The Ministry of Internal Affairs on December 27, 2021 in the format of an electronic auction. The initial maximum contract price was set at 481 million rubles, that is, the ministry was ready to pay 3.62 million rubles for each server.
Applications from applicants were accepted until January 19. After this period, the Ministry published a document from which it follows that one unnamed company initially decided to participate in the tender. However, she later withdrew her application.
Taking into account the absence of real bidders, the tender commission declared the auction invalid. CNews expects comments from the Ministry of Internal Affairs on whether the Ministry intends to restart the tender, and whether anything will change in its terms, for example, the contract price.
"Elbrus" as a supported instruction set architecture in server processors is spelled out in the tender documentation explicitly. True, the TOR also contains specific parameters of chips with sufficiently low characteristics, if we take into account foreign market analogues.
In particular, each server should use four eight-core processors with a base frequency without taking into account the technology of its dynamic change of no higher than 1.4 GHz. Based on these and other parameters, it can be concluded that the Ministry of Internal Affairs aimed at 28-nanometer processors "Elbrus-8S", which were developed by the MCST in 2015 during the execution of the contract with the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Later, the company created more modern 28-nanometer eight-core server chips "Elbrus-8SV". They were released in early 2019 . The chip contains the cores of the fifth-generation Elbrus architecture with a clock frequency up to 1500 MHz, that is, it does not pass through the filter of the requirements of the tender in question. According to the information on the developer's website, this newer processor has been mass-produced since 2020, however, according to CNews, users are still very familiar with it.
In January 2021, representatives of the MCST told CNews that the company plans to order the production of over 10 thousand of its chips during the calendar year — mainly "Elbrus-8SV" and "Elbrus-8S".
Representative of the MCST Konstantin Trushkin, after launching the tender under consideration, the Ministry of Internal Affairs assured CNews that the existing stocks of the company's processors from its partners will allow the ministry to fully meet the demand.
As follows from the technical task, the Ministry of Internal Affairs intended to purchase two-unit rack servers in Rack cases with two hot-swappable power supplies. The rated power of one power supply unit must be at least 1200 watts.
Servers should have two USB 2.0 ports, a dedicated remote control port, two Ethernet ports with a data transfer rate of at least 10 Gbps. The total amount of RAM of each server should be 256 GB.
The devices must include 12 SSD drives of 7680 GB and two SSD drives of 240 GB each. The warranty period of the product must be at least 60 months.
According to the terms of the tender, each of the servers purchased by the Ministry must have a pre-installed domestic operating system from the Russian software registry under the Ministry of Finance. A specific OS vendor is not specified in the technical task, however, as CNews previously found out, the Ministry of Internal Affairs prefers the Astra Linux OS, although it allows the use of analogues.
In addition to it, the software "Service for automating the activities of the centers for automated fixation of administrative offenses in the field of traffic in Moscow" should be installed on the hardware, which will be provided to the contractor by the institution "Special Equipment and Communications" of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
