Halton Housing Trust (HHT) are a not for profit housing association, who own and manage 6 700 homes in the Cheshire towns of Widnes and Runcorn. HHT sought bids from service providers to participate in a tender for the provision of an IT production environment and disaster recovery (DR) managed service. The outcome of the tender process is a single contract with a single service provider. The contract will be an initial 3 years with 1 annual option to extend by a further 12 months, up to a maximum 4 years total contract term. The contract will be available to HHT and all subsidiaries both current and future. The successful service provider will purchase the existing hardware from HHT used to deliver the current production environment and disaster recovery solution. The equipment used to deliver the production environment will be relocated to the service providers data centre and rented back to HHT as part of the managed service agreement. Further details are provided in section II.2.4).

The successful bidder will also need to provide a new NetApp to deliver the production environment solution.

The successful bidder must also provide the equipment needed to deliver the DR solution and provide a fully managed DR service. The current HHT DR equipment will not be required to be used as part of the new solution, however the current DR equipment should still be purchased from HHT. The DR hardware must be located in a different building to the production environment hardware to help ensure the protection of data.

The service provider will be responsible for the implementation and management of the new solution, including moving existing kit from the HHT office and installing in the designated data centre. The production environment and disaster recovery hardware used to deliver the required service must be located in UK data centres.