Accent is currently reviewing its Business Continuity and systems back-up provision to meet the requirements of the UK Homes and Communities Agency governance standards and the wider needs of its own business.
We wish to identify any opportunities within the business continuity management services market place for utilising a third party provider that can offer a range of services which deliver against our stated requirement to meet Accent's internal business recovery objectives in order to minimise and/or mitigate the impact of a serious untoward incident affecting our Head Office, which additionally hosts our National Contact Centre.
1) DR & BC
Accent have approximately 50 systems in the following TTR categories which are eligible for DR, full details are provided in Appendix 6 of the RfP Server List for DR Services (MS Excel XML workbook).
Category 1 Systems (please see Appendix 6 for a list including Cores, RAM and Disk Partitions) to be actively synchronised in real time, and to fail-over to live in the event of an outage of the primary systems. Fail-over to live to be available to either BD17 7SW or the DR Centre (dependent upon the origin of the outage) and all other Accent WAN sites
Category 2 Systems (please see Appendix 6 for a list including Cores, RAM and Disk Partitions) & their associated storage to be presented and available to both the WRS and all other Accent WAN sites with current data presented within 4 hours of invocation
Category 3 Systems (please see Appendix 6 for a list including Cores, RAM and Disk Partitions) & their associated storage to be presented and available to both the WRS and other WAN sites with current data presented within 48 hours of invocation.
Category 4 Systems & their associated storage to be presented as backed up data together with adequate hardware upon which to rebuild & restore. Re-build and restoration work to be carried out by Accent Technical Staff. These systems would only be required in the event of an extremely extended invocation. Please price by VM based upon a nominal 4 cores, 8 GB RAM & 2 partitions totaling 350GB disk space per server.
2) Business as usual (BAU) Back Up
A full list of systems to be covered under this statement of requirements are provided in Appendix 2, Server List for Back Up Services (MS Excel XML workbook).
We require a resilient reliable and simple to operate BAU back up solution which allows both scheduled and ad hoc back-ups of any or all our systems and rapid user friendly restoration at every level from individual file through directory to complete system.
Given the probable size of the proposed data circuit (100MBps) from Accent’s MPLS network into the supplier’s DR facility you may wish to consider placing a back up device into Accent’s head office to both facilitate rapid restorations and de-duplicate data prior to onward transmission to your data vault.
Current back up requirements are between 23 & 33 TB, however over the life of the contract it is inevitable that despite on-going data cleansing activities within Accent this will continue to grow. We are looking for a back-up solution which is scalable without significant additional cost, and especially wish to avoid breaching software pricing break points below 40TB of backed up data.
3) Workplace Recovery Requirements:
40 Workplace Recovery Seats (WRS) located in the same facility as the recovered systems to be available to Accent Staff within 4 hours of invocation.
The ability, by mutual agreement to increase and decrease the number of contracted WRS at any time during the life of the contract always providing that the number of WRS will not at any time reduce below the original contracted number.
Each WRS to be presented with an agreed standard desktop PC with dual 21” or greater monitors (minimum PC specification Core-i5 / 8GB RAM / 250GB SSD / Dual video output).
Each WRS to be presented with an agreed IP Telephone handset / headset (exact specification TBC post Accent Connect Contract Award).