It is intended that this procurement will result in the award of a contract for the packaging, deployment, monitoring and tier 1 & 2 support for myriad Linux VMs around the GÉANT network. The extant contract for these services ends in Qtr 4 2014/15 and needs to be replaced.

Any Contract awarded as a result of this procurement will run for an initial 12 months with possible extensions of up to a further 2 years. Please see the tender documents at www.dante-procurement.net for further details.

There are approximately 250 Linux VMs at the present time with growth forecast at approximately 10 per month (including the optimisation of extant GÉANT services) during the life of any contract. Services performed by the VMs typically include network monitoring and management tools (approximately 70 % of all VMs) and a range of specific VMs for users across the GÉANT community to run their tools on in respect of specific end user facing services or test beds. Each VM deployment will have a number of instances associated with it including development, testing and production.