Provision of Data Protection - Bill of Materials

1. Background

The Public Transport Authority (PTA) has a current backup and recovery environment that is approaching end of life. This system provides data protection services to operational and business systems across the organisation.

The backup infrastructure is dispersed across several locations to provide a resilient solution to the organisational data protection requirements.

In 2021, the PTA embarked on developing an enhanced data protection solution to replace the existing environment. This included the review of the existing environment and the integration of possible solutions into the PTA’s current technology and architecture. A High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design (LLD) have now been developed that satisfies the requirements of the data protection strategy for the PTA into the future. There is a requirement to procure new hardware to achieve the solution objectives and this tender is to source server and storage hardware.

Scope of Requirement

The back infrastructure is made up of three key infrastructure components. These are listed as separate items on the asset management plan, but they are considered as a whole, as the solution needs to be fully integrated.

The PTA seeks to secure hardware for the following components:

• Servers – These are the servers that host the backup application and act as media servers to process the backup data.
• Storage – The disk-based storage that stores the backup data for a retention period of 30 days in a near-line capacity to enable rapid backup and restore.
• Tape Library – The tape backup library that is utilised for long term retention of data backups.

These components need to be considered as a whole, as technology and methodology have changed significantly over the past few years and there are different options available in how backup and recovery systems are architected. These options will be considered as part of the Backup Infrastructure Replacement project.

All offers for the three different components nominated above will be considered separately to determine best outcomes for the hardware procurement and if required due to the nature of the procurement, the PTA may award up to two (2) contracts to different Contactors.