Provision of UCS Blade System for Brighton and Guildford Data Centers

Sussex Police and Surrey Police operate the VMware vSphere hypervisor platform (version 7.0), currently using a mix of HPE C-class blade enclosures and HPE ProLiant Gen9 servers as ESXi nodes. NetApp storage, attached via a mix of Cisco MDS fibre channel switches and NFS, provides the back-end storage, and a Cisco LAN using Nexus 7706 core switches and Nexus 2K fabric extenders as ToR switches. The Nexus 7706 supports 10GbE ports, and the Cisco MDS FC switches supports 32Gbps or lower (32Gbps being preferred for UCS uplinks).

The storage and LAN/SAN switches are relatively new and not in need of replacement. However, the C-class enclosures and Proliants have reached the end of their supported life, and we have a requirement for additional ESXi compute capacity to allow for future projects requiring virtual machines. As the C-class enclosure is a deprecated platform, it is not a viable option to purchase additional HPE ProLiant blades.

The system is to be installed in APC AR3100 server cabinets (600mm w x 1070mm d), with APC AP8853 dual-fed power strips. All components MUST be compatible with this rack configuration. Two adjacent racks are available; it is assumed that one will be used for initial deployment and the second rack reserved for future expansion.