City University London seeking data storage service solution

The university wants to replace part of its ageing storage infrastructure in £600k deal

City University London is looking for a supplier to provide a data storage service solution in a contract worth between £300,000 and £600,000.

The scope of the requirement, noted in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), includes the implementation, support and maintenance services, training, associated professional services including network assessment and consultancy, and on-demand service provision.

The university wants to replace part of its ageing storage infrastructure, including a number of EMC CLARiiON arrays (two CX3-40f arrays and one CX3-20 array) based in two London data centres.

The CLARiiON SAN disk arrays have been discontinued by EMC.

"The current solution has reached the end of its anticipated life and is subject to increasing maintenance costs and expansion limitations," the university said.

It explained that the arrays provide storage for both physical and virtual hosts using Windows and Linux operating systems and both' standard' and database file systems.

The arrays are connected to the university's existing SAN Fabric which comprised of two pairs of Brocade 4Gb/s fibre channel switches.

"There is no intention to replace these at this stage," the university stated.

City University said that it previously purchased its storage outright, as a traditional capital investment, but that this model no longer offered the flexibility it requires.

It therefore wants to purchase a storage service using an "on-premise, capacity on-demand service model", it said.

The three-year contract is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) and can be renewed up to four times for a year, meaning that the maximum length of the contract is seven years.