Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2021-12-03
Buyer: Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin
Country: IE
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Restricted procedure
CPV classification: 30233130 | 30233140 | 30233180 | 32400000 | 32421000
Estimated value: 5000000 EUR
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: Framework for the provision of Private Cloud Infrastructure & Services including HPC, Load Balancers and extending to Public Cloud Services
Trinity College Dublin intend to establish a Framework Agreement (FWA) for the provision of Private Cloud Infrastructure & Services including HPC, Load Balancers and extending to Public Cloud Services. The Lot structure is as follows:
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.
1) Interested parties must register their interest on the eTenders website (www.etenders.gov.ie) in order to be included on the mailing list for clarifications. All information relating to attachments, including clarifications and changes, will be published on the Irish Government Procurement Opportunities Portal (www.etenders.gov.ie) only. Registration is free of charge. The contracting authority will not accept responsibility for information relayed (or not relayed) via third parties;
2) Suppliers must register their interest on the eTenders website (www.etenders.gov.ie) in order to be included on the mailing list for clarifications and to respond electronically to the competition. There is a maximum upload limit of 2GB per document on etenders. Documents larger than this should be divided into smaller files prior to upload or zipped;
3) Should you experience difficulty when uploading documents please contact the eTenders Support Desk for technical assistance. Email etenders@eu-supply.com or Telephone 353(0)212439277 (09.00 a.m. — 17.30 p.m. GMT);
4) All queries regarding this tender requirement or process must be submitted through the Irish Government Procurement Opportunities Portal www.etenders.gov.ie (RFT ID 181647) as a specific question. Responses will be circulated to those tenderers that have registered an interest in this notice on www.etenders.gov.ie The details of the person making a query will not be disclosed when circulating the response;
6) The contracting authority will not be responsible for any costs, charges or expenses incurred by candidates or tenderers;
9) At its absolute discretion, the contracting authority may elect to terminate this procurement process, or any lot, or any contract; awarded or prior to award at any time;
10) Please note in relation to all documents, that where reference is made to a particular standard, make, source, process, trademark, type or patent, that this is not to be regarded as a de facto requirement. In all such cases it should be understood that such indications are to be treated strictly and solely for reference purposes only, to which the words ‘or equivalent’ will always be appended;
11) Without prejudice to the principle of equal treatment, the contracting authority is not obliged to engage in a clarification process in respect of the procurement documents with missing or incomplete information. Therefore, respondents are advised to ensure that they return completed documentation in order to avoid the risk of elimination from the competition;


Winner: CANCOM Ireland Ltd.
Award value: 5000000
Number of bids: 5