Provision of a Core Network Infrastructure Upgrade

West Yorkshire Police wish to update and upgrade the core Network Infrastructure. This tender is to identify potential suppliers who could deliver the required solution in upgrading the infrastructure to meet the increasing:

Capacity, Reliability and Resilience that is essential to support current and future requirements.

There are 2 main Data Centres at Bradford and Wakefield with a 3rd smaller centre in another area of Wakefield. The Data Centres are inter-connected by 2 (diversely routed) 10Gbs fibre circuits, which terminate directly on each of the 4 core nodes. Both Data Centres run in an active/active or active/standby scenario on numerous critical IT systems. Servers are load balanced by a mixture of Kemp’s and Cisco ACE load balancers. Both Data Centres act as a ‘Virtual Data Centre’ by means of stretching VLANs between the 2 sites.

WYP deployed an EMC Isilon storage solution and is in the process of rolling out an ‘in force’ Elastic Cloud Storage solution (ECS) over 4 sites (3xData Centres and 2xDivisions). Isilon replication takes place across the forces Local Area Network (LAN)/Wide Area Network (WAN) network between Bradford - Wakefield (both ways) and Bradford (both ways). ECS is seen to operate in a similar way.

A critical area that is heavily dependent on the availability and reliability of WYPs main LAN/WAN infrastructure is the force Command and Control system and the Integrated Communications and Control System. These support the Customer Contact Centre which is responsible for handling all 999 and Non-emergency calls and the five District Control rooms that handle Emergency Radio dispatch and local call handling. Any disruption to these has a major impact in both service delivery and Officer / Public safety. In addition to above, there are multiple systems that require 24x7 access to ensure both Officer and Public safety, delivering Policing effectiveness utilising multiple systems such as: ANPR, Crime recording, Forensics and Custody