Bank of England selects EMC for £1m storage area network

The Bank of England (BoE) has selected EMC to implement a storage area network (SAN) to facilitate its storage requirements for the next five years.

BoE is set to pay just over £1m for the SAN, and it indicates that over the five-year period it should be capable of storing up to 900TB of usable data, according to a contract award notice.

The SAN will be installed in a phased approach, which will see the new system co-exist with the old system over the next two to three years.

BoE indicates that the new network will need to take into consideration the potential for adding a virtual desktop infrastructure, capable of running 3,500 desktops, where there must be no downgrade in performance if installed.

The system will also be "fully resilient with full component redundancy", which means that if any component of the network fails, performance will not be affected.

EMC will be required to provide maintenance and support for the five-year period, which will include a two-hour on-site response time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The storage solution will support both Windows 2003 and 2008.