Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Tender description

The purpose of this procurement exercise is to achieve most economically and advantageous offer for the supply and installation of a Hyperconverged Infrastructure by Competitive Procedure with Negotiation (CPN). The University is seeking to provide a central hosting facility delivered as an internal on-premises cloud to support its comprehensive suite of digital services and applications including a cloud-native development platform delivering containerised services orchestrated through Kubernetes. This is for Enterprise Infrastructure seeking to provide a central hosting facility for the University’s on-premise Enterprise Services and for services hosted in schools and colleges. The University currently operates several server clusters attached to a storage area network that spans multiple data centres. The estate size is roughly eighty hypervisors and around 1.3PB of used storage. These servers are running VMware’s vSphere hypervisor to provide an internal virtualised hosting platform. In order to get best value that meets the above requirements we wish to replace our existing storage, storage fabric and server hosting infrastructure with a Hyperconverged Infrastructure that provides tightly coupled storage, compute and small but growing graphics capabilities. The hardware procured should provide a turnkey management solution to reduce operational costs. We may also procure professional services along with the hardware to assist with its installation and configuration. The solution should provide all necessary software to configure and maintain the solution procured and interface with monitoring and virtualisation software. The procured solution will underpin the virtual hosting services provided by the University’s Information Services.