Early Market Engagement - Enterprise Backup & Service Continuity solutions

Tender description

The University of Exeter is looking to partner with a vendor that can provide enterprise backup and service continuity solutions with a proven background in providing services to similar institutions. Lot 1: The University of Exeter is looking to partner with a vendor that can provide enterprise backup and service continuity solutions with a proven background in providing services to similar institutions. In order to understand market capabilities and the fullest spectrum of available solutions we are seeking to utilise this early market engagement activity to obtain insight from organisations with relevant solutions who could achieve our stated ambitions and have proven experience of delivering such capability. The outputs of this engagement exercise will inform our formal business case, and our ultimate procurement process in terms of route to market. Background The University of Exeter currently runs a highly available VMware vSphere environment running on a Nutanix cluster spanned across two datacentres. It currently hosts over 700 virtual machines and in excess of 200 physical servers, both Windows and Linux. Although the University currently has a cloud presence, there is no functionality in place to extend the Nutanix infrastructure into the public cloud. At present we have an active/passive deployment with no automatic failover to the secondary datacentre, should a total loss of the primary datacentre occur. We are currently constructing a business case to look at service continuity and improving our RPOs/RTOs within the IT infrastructure and how we can mitigate risks that would lead to extended periods of downtime. To do this we are looking at adding new functionality into our current infrastructure, whether it be creating a fault tolerant virtual environment with automatic failover or expanding our DR (Disaster Recovery) capabilities into the cloud. Increased protection against cyber-attacks related incidents is exceptional important nowadays as universities are getting targeted more frequently. A large part of the project is to replace our current backup products. There are currently four methods we use to back up several types of data and we are looking to consolidate these into one unified backup solution. The backup solution must be secure and immutable with an air-gapped repository. It should also be able to archive backups to public cloud storage with seamless functionality to restore directly to the VMware Environment (and Nutanix AHV in the future) or alternatively restore services into the public cloud to provide DR capability. Response to Early Market Engagement We are seeking suppliers with the relevant capability and experience to initial provide written feedback via the University of Exeter eTendering portal; https://uk.eu-supply.com/login.asp?B=EXETER by initially registering interest in this specific opportunity; UOE/2022/073/SD, and submitting your written response to the published requirements (accessible via the eTendering portal) in the form of a word or pdf file, no later than 17:00hrs on the 12th October 2022. Additional information: Attached as document