Systems and technical consultancy services

Tender description

Trinity College Dublin intend to establish a Framework Agreement (FWA) for the provision of private cloud infrastructure and services including HPC, Load Balancers and extending to public cloud services. The lot structure is as follows: Lot 1: IaaS Integrator and Technology Partner; Lot 2: Research Computing: HPC Clusters and storage; Lot 3: HPC Cloud Specialist; Lot 4: Load Balancers. Trinity’s current private cloud infrastructure and related services, V+C+E contract, is end of life with some hardware approaching end of service life and must be considered for replacement with a compliant, converged infrastructure solution to maintain the current footprint of on prem hosted services. Lot 1 of the proposed Framework will be used to draw down hardware and services as required over the 4 year period. Contracts activated from the FWA may therefore extend beyond the 4 year period but all contracts will terminate within 7 years of the award of the FWA. As part of this tender process, Trinity are seeking a single integrator and technology partner who can manage scaling technologies and provide goods and services. This will include, but not limited to, expertise, experience, support, direction and augmentation to the IaaS Platform from overall design, implementation, compliancy, software orchestration and virtualisation technologies. The integrator must have the highest available OEM certifications for each element of the solution and deliver the highest quality of service. High Performance Computing clusters in Trinity College are supported by the Trinity RIT Team. A maximum of three (3) vendors will be appointed to the framework to meet the requirements of Lot 2. This will include HPC appropriate hardware to support on-prem HPC clusters with a high speed interconnect and separate management network. A cluster will generally access a low latency high performance parallel filesystem. A cluster will be heterogeneous in sense that the majority of compute nodes will be multicore but the cluster is expected to also contain GPU nodes. A cluster must be extensible via hardware drawdown over the life of the framework. A cluster will be located in one of TCDs two on-campus data centres. High Performance Computing clusters in Trinity College are supported by the Trinity RIT Team. A maximum of three (3) vendors will be appointed to the framework to meet the requirements of Lot 3 which seeks advisory services for optimisation of HPC resources in the public cloud. Trinity can avail of a GÉANT purchasing agreement to source Cloud based IaaS infrastructure. This Lot 3 seeks suitably qualified HPC integrator/specialists to provide the support, implementation and configuration services. The existing external load balancers at Trinity will need to be replaced to provide an equivalent or improved service by October 2021. The internal load balancers will need to be replaced by August 2022 assuming the current capacity in the appliances is sufficient up to this point. As part of this tender, Trinity are seeking a load balancing technology partner for the framework term (4 years) who can manage scaling technologies and provide goods and services. This will include, but not limited to, expertise, experience, direction and augmentation to the load balancer technology from overall design, implementation, compliancy, software orchestration. Applicants must have the highest available level of OEM certifications to deliver the highest quality of service.