PHILADELPHIA GAS WORKS

Transcription

1 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 QUESTIONS Regarding section Hosting Services. The last bullet on page 6 states Primary Data center facility to be located in Philadelphia. Does this just confirm that PGW already has an existing data center at 800 W. Montgomery, and that the new site must be within 125 miles of that location? In this section it lists racks and an extensive list of IT systemsservers, switches, san, telecom, etc. Are these systems that PGW will procure and install in the provided racks? Or are you looking for the bidder to Procure, Install, Manage, Maintain the hardware as well as the licensing? Under section Recovery Services, you identify the need for 645 WorkGroup positions, including desktop PCs, along with supporting Telecom PBX, VM boxes, Network switches, Wintel/Linux Blade Centers and HP Unix servers, etc. Is PGW procuring all of the IT, SAN and Communications systems? or are you looking for the bidder to procure, install, manage and maintain this hardware? Section 2.3- pricingreferences line item pricing for each item. On page 9 of the RFP, section 2.6 Licensing, the RFP states: The Proposer will be authorized to do business in the A1 A2 A3 A4 ANSWERS PGW s primary data center is located within Philadelphia. Alternate DR site must be within 125 miles from Philadelphia. Racks will host PGW equipment procured by PGW. Servers, switches, SAN and telecom will be procured and maintained by bidder. The selected proposer will procure the listed equipment for recovery services. This authorization and licensure is not required to submit a proposal. It will be required prior to entering into a contract with PGW. Page 1 of 12

2 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and comply with all pertinent state and federal requirements, codes and regulations. If Proposer is a business as defined in The Philadelphia Code, Section , the Proposer must have a valid business privilege license, issued by the City of Philadelphia s Department of Licenses and Inspections, to do business in the City of Philadelphia, prior to entering into any contract with PGW. Question: What evidence do you need or look to, in order to make a determination that: a) The business is authorized to do business in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania? b) What do you need to see that will satisfy the requirement that the business has a valid business privilege license (the physical license, a document, a license number, etc.)? c) If business does not have the license by the time the bid is due (January 30 th ), is the business disqualified from being considered for the RFP? If the answer is no, what do you need to see or review in order to enable the business to bid? Page 2 of 12

3 Q5 Providing a Shared Blade configuration poses multiple logistical and networking concerns making the solution abundantly cost prohibitive. Is PGW open to similar solutions that provide a similar recovery experience at a more affordable price point? A5 a) Yes b) 48 hours c) 48 hours (a) Is PGW open to a collaborate session with Sungard AS recovery experts to further understand your unique requirements and review possible solutions? (b) Please outline your current Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) (c) Please provide your desired RTO and RPO objectives moving forward Q6 PGW s RFP Section 2.2 Scope of Work for Disaster Recovery and Hosting Services does not include the solution components listed below, but they are currently contracted for under PGW s Hosting and Recovery Schedules. Please clarify if PWG wants Sungard AS to include these components in the Scope of Work, and please confirm that the counts are current. A6 Yes Page 3 of 12

4 (d) Hosting 1. Dedicated Networking Circuits (i) Fiber/Optical Circuit (ii) DS-1 Circuits (15) (iii)10gig Connection between Hosting and DR sites (e) Recovery (i) PC s imaging services for your personnel recovery (ii) Network Startup Assistance (iii)server OS and ESX Startup Assistance on all servers Q7 Please provide the following information for your existing blade configuration: (a) Chassis & Blade Make and Model A7 a) HP or UCS b) 2 c) d) Intel e) 100G Page 4 of 12

5 (b) #of Chassis, # of Blades PHILADELPHIA GAS WORKS (c) # of CPU per Blade (Physical Socket) (d) Processor Make and Model (e) Amount of RAM Per Blade (f) Amount Internal Usable HD Space (g) Hard Dive Type (h) Please confirm the amount of occupied storage (used storage) vs provisioned storage (total allocated) (i) Do you use any of the internal hard space to run physical or virtual workloads? (j) Do you use of any of your blades to support physical server s operations as standalone systems other than ESX hosts? If so how many physical servers? (k) What does a blades server configuration accomplish for PWG during disaster recovery f) NA g) NA h) Total allocated storage is provided in RFP. i) Yes j) Yes, 14 servers k) NA l) NA m) Yes n) 3 o) No p) 10 q) NA r) Blades only Page 5 of 12

6 testing or declaration compared to HPDL380 and HPDL580 rackmount servers? (l) Number of VMs supported in DR? (m) Are you running VMware, what version? (n) # of ESX Hosts currently support in DR the environment? (o) Are you using VMware SRM(Site Recovery Manager) for orchestration. (p) # of VLANs in the DR environment. (q) Total amount of vcpu and MEM required to be mounted to storage for virtual environment(s) (Note: Report Can Be Pulled for RVTools) (r) Please outline the specs for any physical rackmount server hardware aside from blade enclosures & blades in use in production today that would be require for disaster recovery. Q8 The RFP states to include Attachment A in tab 3 Proposal Pricing and tab 6 Completed Attachments A, B and C. Please A8 The reference to Attachment A in tab 3 is incorrect. Please include Attachment A in tab 6. Page 6 of 12

7 clarify what tab PGW wants Attachment A to be incorporated. Q9 Please further clarify what information PGW is requesting service providers to provide in the 4 Proposer Information attachment, Section 4.3 Business Experience, sub-section 4.3.1, since references are being requesting in sub-section Q Is the Primary Data Center on the customer premises or within a hosting provider today? Q Is there a migration strategy in place for exiting the existing Hosting and Recovery Services provider? Q What has changed with the existing solution to prompt an RFP? Q Is PGW required to have a public bid/rfp in order to meet policy, regulatory or compliance? Q Are the PGW Business Continuity and IT teams open to conversations around alternative Recovery Solutions available through TierPoint? Q /2.2.2 Is the 3 Cabinet specification for Primary or Disaster Recovery? Please clarify whether the Recovery Services and Hosting Services need to be located in Philadelphia? Q Recovery Services What is the minimum distance requirement for Hosting and Recovery PHILADELPHIA GAS WORKS A9 A10 A11 A12 A13 A14 A15 A16 The references provided in Section should be the entities for which the proposer provided the services described in Section Primary data center is on site. No The procurement rules applicable to PGW require that this type of service be the subject of an RFP at least every 4 years. The procurement rules applicable to PGW require that this type of service be the subject of an RFP at least every 4 years. No PGW s primary data center is located within Philadelphia. Alternate DR site must be within 125 miles from Philadelphia. No minimum requirement Page 7 of 12

8 Services? (Max Distance (125 miles confirmed) Q Will PGW be free of any and all contract obligations related to this environment including network/bandwidth provider? Q18 SSI maintains infrastructure in 6 data centers located within 125 miles of each other in Pennsylvania. We are more than happy to accommodate an architecture with an alternate facility in a variety of distances. Would preference be given for an alternate facility within 25 miles? 50 miles? 75 miles? Or 100 miles? Or is the best case scenario one with an alternate facility as far as possible but within 125 miles of primary? Q19 In terms of contract term, the agreement between PGW and the successful Proposer will have an initial term of four years, if agreement is satisfactory for PGW, will the contract renew for an additional four years? Or will it renew in annual increments after the initial four years? Q20 If SSI can virtualize server workloads to reduce physical hosting service requirements and decrease the number of 42U Locking Racks necessary for co-location, will this be of interest to PGW? PHILADELPHIA GAS WORKS A17 A18 A19 A20 Yes No preference. The procurement rules applicable to PGW require that this type of service be the subject of an RFP at least every 4 years. There will be no renewal past the initial term of 4 years. PGW is already using a virtual solution. Q21 If SSI can provide a primary data center facility located in A21 PGW s primary data center is located within Philadelphia. Alternate Page 8 of 12

9 Q22 Q23 Q24 Philadelphia, with an alternate site for disaster recovery within 125 miles along with a data center in Las Vegas, NV for bi-coastal, geographically disparate architecture, would that be of interest to PGW? SSI provides quarterly disaster recovery testing with SLA documentation for 3rd party auditors at no charge. Will annual 48 hour exercise windows be scheduled events with advanced notification? And would PGW be interested in bi-annual or quarterly DR testing? SSI Disaster Recovery Services Center will provide a 65 seat call center, with access to Digital PBX Features and Functionality through VoIP compatible phones, will voice mailboxes be preconfigured for specific PGW employees during alternate site setup? Or would you prefer to have automated voice mailboxes on the 48 port system? SSI personnel will provide Cisco CCIE certified, Netware CAN certified, Windows MCSE certified, Novell SUSE NCLE certified and UNIX certified personnel, would it be helpful for us to schedule in person interviews for all techs and engineers involved with this agreement? A22 A23 A24 DR site must be within 125 miles from Philadelphia. Yes, Bi-annual Prefer automated voice mailboxes No Page 9 of 12

10 Q25 In order to facilitate a contract commencement date on or A25 No before March 1, 2017, SSI will need to move quickly to ensure a smooth transition. Will SSI be able to conduct a technical discovery of PGW infrastructure to ensure proper colocation equipment is provided prior to proposal submission due date of January 30, 2017? Q26 Do you prefer a specific tape library vendor with LTO-5 and A26 No LTO-6 drives attached? SSI has several different options and would be more than happy to propose our preferred vendor, unless you have something specific in mind. Q27 Will other agent based or agentless backup solutions be a A27 PGW will use its own solution. viable alternative to the LTO-5 and LTO-6 backup storage? Q28 Will the 28 Blade Center Servers and the HP Integrity be A28 No required to be configured as a high availability architecture with constant replication between PGW to our datacenter? Q29 If replication is done on an ongoing basis, how much data do A29 NA you estimate will be transferred between PGW and SSI's datacenter on a monthly basis? Q30 Does PGW run any virtualization technology on their servers A30 Yes such as VMware, Hyper-V or XenServer? Q31 Is PGW open to replicate their servers to a mixed A31 PGW is already using a mixed environment. Page 10 of 12

11 virtual/hardware environment at SSI's datacenter instead of a full hardware environment? Windows and Linux machines could possibly be replicated and virtualized on our VMware VCloud environment which would cut down some of the cost on the disaster recovery solution. Q32 Will PGW require SSI to stage a full disaster recovery scenario A32 Yes during the Annual 48 Hour Exercise Window? Will the desks, phones, PCs, Copier and servers need to be running during this exercise or just the servers? Q33 Can you please provide details on any outside network A33 PGW will provide the connection to the DR facility. connections such as MPLS or VPN connections that will be needed for PGW to connect to the hosted solution? Q34 How will data replication between the primary and DR site be A34 By PGW. handled? Q35 For the DR site is there any specific geographical locations A35 No preference that PGW has a desire to be in? Other than within the 125 mile requirement from 800 W. Montgomery Ave site. Q36 Will PGW be providing all Hypervisor, OS, and database A36 Yes licenses for the solution? If these need to be included in our proposal, please provide a full list with quantities of the licenses that will be needed for the solution. Q37 Is PGW looking for the provider to provide full managed A37 No. PGW will be responsible for restoring. Page 11 of 12

12 services on all physical equipment and virtual machines running in the environment? If so can we get a breakdown of the use for all 28 blade servers as well as the number and use for all virtual machines that will be running in the environment? Q38 For the 60TB of storage should the assumption be made that A38 Yes this should all be quoted as Tier 1 (SSD/15K) based storage or is there a desire to have tiered storage for the environment? Q39 Please provide details on the specific services that PGW is A39 Load OS, however it s not required. looking for in the Managed Recovery Services request. Q40 Is March 1 PGW's firm start date? A40 Preferred start date. Q41 We would like to respond to this RFP with our trusted partner. In terms of structure, we intend to be the Prime on this RFP, with Partner being our subcontractor. Together, our combined team will handle 100% of the requirements. However, in the RFP there are several questions directed to the Proposer, which I assume is the Prime and many of these we cannot answer yes without the inclusion of our Partner. So, the question is where there are questions about capabilities directed to the Proposer, can we provide an answer based upon the combined experience and capabilities of both companies? A41 Yes Page 12 of 12