PRONI - Hardware and Software for the CALM Catalogue System

Tender description

At present the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) utilises a system based on Blade PCs to provide public access to the PRONI Catalogue for searching, ordering, retrieving and processing of records. This solution is limited in that the end user station must be within a certain distance of the physical blade PC. PRONI is moving to a new dedicated building from September 2010 and as such requires a more flexible solution for the provision of Public and Staff terminals throughout the building with no distance limitation on placement (within reach of the Ethernet network) PRONI now requires a supplier to provide a complete ICT supply/implement and support solution of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure environment in the new Premises at Titanic Quarter, Belfast. Suppliers should note that PRONI has successfully carried out concept testing of the core application and clients on a VMWare (vSphere 4) solution based on standard hardware operating in a virtual Microsoft Windows Server 2008 / Windows XP virtual client environment. All software used in the testing are Northern Ireland Civil Service strategic ICT products. At the outset the Virtualisation solution must be capable of supporting 50 Windows XP Virtual Desktops of varying roles as well as Windows 2008 Virtual Server. The solution must also be capable of migrating sever and clients between physical servers to provide high availability and failover (vMotion) and be capable of expansion. PRONI will supply the Windows Server 2008 operating system DVD and appropriate licensing at time of installation. Suppliers must include all client and other licensing in their costs including pricing for annual licensing and support if any.