IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Tender description

The European Commission (EU) has entrusted ECMWF with the implementation of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) for the period of 2014 to 2020. Its principal objective is to enhance the knowledge base to support climate change adaptation and mitigation policies. The Climate Data Store (CDS) constitutes the core building block of the C3S and will be at the heart of the C3S infrastructure. The system is designed to provide a consolidated view and point of access to climate data that is distributed over multiple data suppliers. All C3S data will be catalogued in the CDS, and augmented with quality information that allows the data users to discover, appraise and select appropriate data. The CDS will also provide a set of tools (toolbox), workflows and applications that will allow users to perform processing, computation, transformation and visualisation on top of catalogued data. Users will be presented with options to either download raw data or to build workflows based on concatenation of one or more data sources and parameterised tools, submit these to the system, directly visualise data or even to create ad-hoc applications through available functionalities. The web portal and backend systems manage all interfaces and brokers between internal components and the distributed data providers through so called adaptors. The user experiences a single portal environment with consistent style, interface and controls. Data requested on the web portal can be delivered raw to the user's home site, or it can be moved into the CDS compute area for processing. In order to assure the highest quality of service, the Copernicus Climate Change Service aims to benefit from the latest state-of-the-art technologies, hardware and software, setting up a reference framework infrastructure able to accommodate evolving needs and requirements coming from a wide diversity of users and sectors, from experts and scientists to policy makers, while keeping the integrity and robustness of the system. Aligned with the European Cloud Computing Strategy adopted by the European Commission, the Copernicus strategy foresees an incremental and fast adoption of cloud based infrastructures. In line with these aims, and taking into consideration the huge volumes of data needed to be transferred into the system, it has been decided to host the CDS on a fully managed On-premises Private Cloud with an additional public cloud service to allow for growth-the Hybrid Cloud solution. The purpose of this call for tender is the procurement of a fully managed Cloud Hosting Service. Note: The contract shall have an initial duration to the end of 2018 with optional yearly renewals thereafter until the end of 2021. Estimated value: the value is based on responses received to the previously published RFI and the estimated level of usage. The actual spend will be dictated by the level of take up by the service users. Further information can be found in the ITT documents.