Since 2007, the BRIC has been engaged in a virtualization process, on behalf of its regional partners as well as on its own account.

Today, the BRIC is positioning itself as a host of services in its own cloud. In this context, some organizations in the Brussels region benefit from a space to manage their virtualized servers in the BRIC cloud.

The BRIC wishes to continue along this path. As previous contracts are coming to an end, the BRIC has consolidated its needs in this area into a single market "equipment and virtualization for Datacenter".

Finally, it should be noted that the BRIC has set itself the long-term objective of positioning itself more as a Regional Datacenter. This ambitious goal entails certain constraints: flexibility and adaptability of the infrastructure, the necessary economy of scale and, of course, the implementation of a Disaster Recovery Plan.

This contract is part of this perspective and the proposed solutions must be able to be used "by default" in a configuration using two physical data centers.

In this respect, the successful bidder will not only be a supplier of hardware and software, but a partner who, together with the BRIC, seeks the optimal solution according to the needs formulated at the time and according to the medium/long-term objectives.

This batch is mainly oriented rackable equipment of type x86 and it will be used to:

• expand capacity as needed

existing infrastructures (hard disk, memory, controller, power supply, network card, etc.).

• install new infrastructure.

The scope of this lot includes:

✔ the supply of equipment

– equipment certified by the manufacturers

– interconnectivity components

✔ hardware warranty, support and maintenance

✔ on-site technical support

✔ a set of services relating to the supply of equipment:

– the delivery, installation and configuration of the equipment by certified personnel, including integration into the existing one at the BRIC or with the contracting authorities benefiting from this contract.

– documentation (installation and performance report, "as built", intervention report, ...)

– technical-commercial consulting services: site survey, compatibility study, etc.

– services for the definition and planning of a target infrastructure and formulation of solutions to optimize the target infrastructure and architecture.

The BRIC also has a virtualization infrastructure based on the RISC processor architecture. It is now composed of several servers such as IBM Power Systems. The scope of this lot includes:

✔ provision of compatible hardware to extend existing servers

✔ the provision of RISC servers and storage for RISC servers, as well as software

✔ warranty, support and maintenance of the equipment

✔ a technical support service

✔ delivery, installation and configuration of hardware by certified personnel, including integration of the virtualization solution

✔ documentation related to the delivery of equipment

✔ the definition of the optimal architecture and configuration of the infrastructure, taking into account the different (existing) components that are interconnected and taking into account the objectives of the BRIC

Virtualization or hypervisor products are at the heart of the business of the BRIC and its institutional partners. Given the large volume of licences/subscriptions, a special lot has been allocated for their provision and management.

This lot includes:

✔ licensing/subscription

✔ annual software maintenance (support, update, ...)

✔ renewal of maintenance and support of existing licenses/subscriptions

✔ services ancillary to the provision of licences/subscriptions and their possible costs

✔ licensing of tools compatible with the virtualization solution