Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2020-12-01
Buyer: University Of Edinburgh
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 51611100 | 72000000 | 72100000 | 72222300: Information technology services | 72228000: Equipment integration consultancy services

Technical requirements: 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.
The purpose of this procurement exercise is to achieve most economically and advantageous offer for the supply and installation of a Hyper-converged 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 1.3 PB 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 Hyper-converged 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.
Enterprise licence agreement. The VMware Enterprise licence agreement and additional VMware software do not form part of this procurement.
The University is considering building on our existing investment in VMware vSphere and is looking at adopting the VMware Cloud Foundation suite of software, which if integrated into an HCI solution procured through this procurement would deliver the savings reduction in operational costs. However, we are open to other solutions that can demonstrate equivalent or better functionality to that delivered by our existing hypervisor and that can reduce our operational costs.
We are looking for expressions of interest in the provision of hardware and associated professional services to design the solution. Our prior market engagement has suggested the following as possible solutions:
— an appliance-based infrastructure with turnkey management providing integrated CPU, storage and graphics capabilities and tight integration with VMware Cloud Foundation;
— a vSAN-ready node infrastructure providing integrated CPU, storage and graphics capability but reduced integration with VMware’s Cloud Foundation management tools;
— appliance based solutions utilising other hypervisor technology that provide equivalent or better functionality to a solution built to support VMware Cloud Foundation;
Note: to register your interest in this notice and obtain any additional information please visit the Public Contracts Scotland Web Site at https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/Search/Search_Switch.aspx?ID=634752.