TC933 - Provision of Data Centre Facilities and Migration Partner

Manchester City Council's Data Centre Strategy defines the migration from the existing Council-owned single data centre to two new co-location facilities providing a robust and resilient disaster recovery solution to meet tight business RPO and RTO across a range of services and applications.

The Council requires two industry leading co-location data centre facilities in the Manchester area to host a total of twenty racks split across both locations for an initial three year period. In addition, the successful supplier will provide migration services to assist the Council moving out of the existing data centre.

The Council has some in house skills to migrate systems from the existing data centre to the two new data centres. These resources are limited in number and have existing commitments to business as usual service provision. Professional services are therefore required to bolster the Council's migration team - this work will include physical hardware migrations, virtual machine migrations and associated networking, operating system and application configuration changes.

A new network infrastructure will be installed in the two new data centres - the design, supply, implementation and configuration of this network infrastructure is outside of the scope of this tender.

The Council's existing data centre is approximately 6 years old and includes industry standard data centre infrastructure of a good quality standard - UPS, generators, electrical switchgear, air conditioning and rack units. Once migrations to the new data centres are complete the Council wishes to dispose of this equipment in the most economically advantageous manner and decommission the data centre in readiness for handing back the facility to the landlord.