Provision of Core Infrastructure Design, Deployment and Service Transition

Item Description:

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the “EBRD” or the “Bank”) is an international financial institution. The EBRD has its headquarters at One Exchange Square, London, EC2A 2JN, the United Kingdom.

The EBRD was established by treaty in 1990 to foster the transition towards open market oriented economies and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Commonwealth of Independent States that are committed to and applying the principles of multiparty democracy, pluralism and market economics. The EBRD has 63 members (61 countries, the European Community and the European Investment Bank). Further information about the EBRD’s roles and activities can be found on the EBRD’s website: http://www.ebrd.com. 

Purpose of this Pre-Qualification Questionnaire

The Bank is moving headquarters and has therefore initiated a programme (the “Programme”) to replace the existing HQ-based machine rooms and disaster recovery datacentre with two new co-located datacentre facilities. The new data centres will operate both production and development workloads symmetrically in a resilient configuration to support disaster recovery.

EBRD is looking to consolidate on a green-field homogenous infrastructure technology platform that will replace the current heterogeneous estate which has developed organically over the last 20 years.

EBRD wishes to engage a suitably qualified supplier to deliver:

• Analysis of workloads, resources, operating systems and databases
  • Identify constraints that would guide design phases
• Core Infrastructure Platform design
  • High level designs, low level designs and test plans
• Deploy & test the new Infrastructure Platform in both data centres
  • Project plan, resource plan, service tests & data centre failover tests.
• Knowledge transfer and service handover to EBRD’s outsourced operational partners.
  • Run workshops, supply operational and architectural documentation

The solution must be resilient and allow for continuing operations during a total failure of a single datacentre.

The core technologies that EBRD wishes to adopt or continue to invest in includes:

• Cisco ACI networking
• VMware virtualization platform
• Cisco HyperFlex Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI)
• NetApp block storage
• InfoBlox IPAM and DNS integrations

EBRD also has an Azure presence used for our bespoke application development teams and to support a growing Microsoft 365 estate. There are no plans to migrate on-premise applications to Azure during the data centre move, but increasing use of Azure and other cloud platforms for hybrid operations is part of our medium-term strategy.

The new UK data centres will be sourced in Q2 2020 with core infrastructure build out targeted for completion by December 2020.

The application migration is planned to start January 2021 and must be completed by Q4 2021.

As a first step in the process, interested suppliers are hereby invited to submit a Pre-qualification Questionnaire (“PQQ”). Responses to the PQQ will be evaluated. Only suppliers who answer “yes” to all questions in the Minimum Requirements section A, will be deemed pre-qualified. Suppliers who are pre-qualified may be formally invited to submit detailed proposals against a Request for Proposal (“RFP”).

PQQ Document