14/01: Storage Environment Replacement.

Descriptions

The University's current storage area network (SAN) consists of two HP EVA 8100s approximately 1 km apart and linked by dark fibre which provides resilient storage, they are in excess of five years old and running close to current capacity. The SAN is used pre-dominantly to host virtual servers currently running in a VMWare high availability cluster, the virtual servers run on Dell hardware. In addition, backup solutions were purchased with the SAN these products are Quest vRanger for the virtual machine backups and for physical server backups HP Data Protector which is linked to two HP MSL 4048 tape libraries.The contract is for a replacement of all the existing storage, virtualization hosts, and backup system capabilities. The storage replacement will need to provide similar functionality to the existing system and the virtualization hosts will be required to run both VMWare vSphere and Microsoft HyperV high availability clusters.ScopeFor the supply of goods and/or services to meet the documented high level requirements outlined in the document 'Storage Environment Replacement' included within the document pack.It is anticipated that the solution will have a supported lifecycle of 5 years.The supplier will provide installation and support documentation.The supplier will provide training options including any associated costs.It is expected that the current SAN and backup infrastructure will run in parallel with the replacement solution without any loss of service. The complete migration of systems from the current SAN to the new solution is not part of the scope however some systems will need to be migrated and backed up to prove the new solution.