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's vision is to ‘deliver high-quality and excellent services for all’. Its' mission is to ‘provide high-quality housing services with a social conscience’. HHT is seeking bids from service providers to participate in a tender for the provision of an IT production environment and disaster recovery (DR) managed service. The PQQ will be used to short-list approximately 6 bidders to be invited to submit an ITT. The outcome of the tender process will be 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 anticipated contract award date is estimated to be during December 2016. The contract will be available to HHT and all subsidiaries both current and future.

HHT are seeking bids from service providers to participate in a tender for the provision of an IT production environment and disaster recovery (DR) managed service.

HHT IT infrastructure hardware for the production environment is currently installed at the HHT Daresbury Point office in Runcorn, with DR hardware installed at a secondary HHT office in Foundry Lane, Widnes. HHT are re-locating to a single new office in Widnes by August 2017 and do not want to store infrastructure hardware at this site. HHT wish to engage with a service provider to manage the production environment and DR solution on behalf of HHT.

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. A NetApp currently used at the production site is reaching the end of its life-cycle. The successful bidder will therefore 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. Detail of the equipment to be purchased from HHT is included within the service specification document.

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.

It is anticipated that the time-line for implementation will be structured as follows:

— DR implementation, testing and acceptance time-line: 15.1.2017 to 15.3.2017

— Production environment implementation, testing and acceptance time-line: 15.3.2017 to 15.5.2017

This is for information only and may be subject to change at the discretion of HHT.

All elements of the DR and production environment solution must be fully implemented and operational by 15.5.2017 at the latest.

Full details of the required service can be found within the tender documents and service specification included within the Supporting Information section of the PQQ.