Manchester City Council Report for Information. Report to: Resource and Governance Overview and Scrutiny Committee - 15 December 2011

Transcription

1 Manchester City Council Report for Information Report to: Resource and Governance Overview and Scrutiny Committee - 15 December 2011 Subject: Report of: Data Centre Provisioning Project City Treasurer Summary To provide details to the Committee on the progress made to upgrade the Council s data centre, including moving the current data centre from Daisy Mill, designing and implementing a new data centre at the Sharp Project, and providing enhanced resilience for the Council s ICT systems. Recommendations i) To note and provide comments on the approach being implemented to deliver the project in full by the end of December ii) To note that the Chair will be asked to exempt the key decision relating to the capital expenditure (CAPEX) for this upgrade to the data centre from call in to allow a contract to be awarded prior to the end of December 2011 to facilitate the move from Daisy Mill to the Sharp Building by the 31 March Wards Affected: All Contact Officers: Name: Richard Paver Name: Allan Jones Position: City Treasurer Position: Interim Head of IT Telephone: Telephone: richard.paver@manchester.gov.uk allan.jones@manchester.gov.uk Name: Ian Marshall Name: Paul Barrington Position: Head of ICT Performance (*SRO) Position: Project Manager Telephone: Telephone: i.marshall@manchester.gov.uk p.barrington@manchester.gov.uk 13

2 Background documents (available for public inspection): Invitation to Tender Document Evaluation Criteria Document Pricing Schedule 14

3 1.0 Introduction 1.1 A key element in improving the Council s IT infrastructure resilience is the development of a modern data centre. 1.2 ICT have been working with Corporate Procurement to undertake a tender process to appoint a supplier with extensive data centre design and migration experience to deliver the following actions:- Data centre Design: Review Manchester City Council s existing data centre and produce a new scalable & value for money data centre design, reutilising existing hardware to reduce costs without compromising quality. Establish a New Primary data centre: Migrate the services currently hosted at the Daisy Mill data centre to a new primary data centre at the Council s Sharp Project building by March Establish a New Secondary Business Continuity data centre at a Geographically Separate Site: Likely at Salford City Council's Civic Centre, Swinton. Vacate Daisy Mill: Decommission the Daisy Mill data centre. 1.3 The benefits that this project will deliver include:- Increased resilience for the Council s ICT infrastructure, resulting in improved system availability Additional capacity to enable MCC to implement new technologies and ways of working Reduce disaster recovery timeframes by implementing a single coherent backup and recovery solution Reduce revenue spend, the carbon footprint related to power consumption and reduce costs of maintenance Provide a scalable infrastructure capable of hosting other organisations (enabler for the GM Community Cloud ) 2.0 Background 2.1 The existing Daisy Mill data centre has been an area of risk in terms of business continuity since the data centre in the Town Hall Extension was decanted in December As such, any issues in the data centre could cause a system outage for the whole of MCC. More resilient equipment and a secondary, geographically separate data centre will address this risk. 2.2 The Sharp Project has already been fitted with state of the art fire suppression, air conditioning, UPS (fail-over power provided via batteries/generators) and server racks. 2.3 Almost 80% of the active server equipment at Daisy Mill is End of Life meaning it is no longer supported by the original manufacturer. Simply relocating the existing equipment would be both costly and pose a risk to continued service provision. In addition the current data centre has reached its 15

4 maximum power and air conditioning capacity resulting in no additional server capacity. This is prohibiting further expansion and therefore preventing the Council implementing change and taking advantage of new technologies. 2.4 The existing backup solution is a complex configuration of independent systems (including tape and disc technologies). It would take several days to restore services to business as usual if there was a major incident at Daisy Mill. Implementation of a single disc based backup and restore solution, together with a secondary data centre, will reduce the disaster recovery time to hours. 2.5 Public sector services have entered into a changed era and the need for collaboration to maximise efficiencies is high on the agenda. The new data centre will be built on a scalable virtualised design enabling collaboration and mutual disaster recovery with other AGMA authorities and partners. This new way of working will also allow MCC to consolidate our existing server estate and significantly lower the number of servers in use, which will reduce maintenance costs and energy usage. 3.0 The Procurement Process 3.1 Three bids were received in response to the Invitation to Tender (ITT). Both the written and interview stages have been completed with a request for references being the final area of clarification. 3.2 Work is ongoing with Salford City Council to ensure their data centre refresh exercise and the MCC project provides a compatible platform, primarily for business continuity with future scope for further collaboration. This partnership also offers additional design due diligence and knowledge sharing for both Councils. 3.3 In order to be able to produce an accurate total cost for the project a discovery and design exercise is required in advance. This will detail the work required to virtualise the current server estate, detail the equipment required to host MCC applications and migrate the servers to the new data centre. 3.4 The target is to award a contract on the 19 th of December 2011 to the successful bidder to enable work to commence immediately in the New Year to enable the move to the Sharp Building to take place by March The budget allocated for the upgrade of the data centre is 1.925m capital and 350,000 revenue (based on revenue costs associated with the current data centre). It is anticipated that the tender prices will be within the allocated budget, however, the pricing is subject to a due diligence exercise by the appointed supplier. 4.0 Conclusion 4.1 The decision to award a contract for the upgrade and movement of the Council s data centre will provide a solution which will allow further efficiencies 16

5 in the way the Council operates and provide greater resilience for the Council s IT infrastructure and reduce disaster recovery timescales. 5.0 Recommendations 5.1 To note and provide comments on the project approach being implemented to deliver the project in full by the end of December To note that the Chair will be asked to exempt the key decision relating to the capital expenditure (CAPEX) for this upgrade to the data centre from call in to allow a contract to be awarded prior to the end of December 2011 to facilitate the move from Daisy Mill to the Sharp Building by the 31 March