Provision of Cloud Hosting Services for Climate Data Store

We (Cetis) had a look at this ITT, and though interesting, concluded it was too much for us to do by ourselves
https://procontract.due-north.com/Advert/Index?advertId=1da42289-7f3c-e711-80e1-005056b64545
“C3S_23b Provision of Cloud Hosting Services for Climate Data Store (CDS)”

Is there anyone else with this kind of expertise / experience?

Simon

Looking at the specification PDF they appear to be after a rack or so of servers running OpenStack or something like it — the parts that caught my eye:

Computing resources and Virtualization must be based on well-
known and trusted hypervisor technologies. (eg ESX, KVM, XEN etc)

The initial system performance shall be comparable to:

  • 32 nodes with 64GB RAM and 24 or more Intel cores each.

The initial system shall have a minimum storage volume of 1PB in at least two different types of storage:

  • Tier 1 “High Performance” storage with a file copy / write speed of 150MB/s or better.
  • Tier 2 “Normal Performance” storage with a file copy / write speed of 40MB/s or better.

The initial balance of the different storage types will be:

  • 10% of the storage having “high performance”
  • 90% of the storage having “normal Performance”.

The Cloud Management software shall allow to programmatically interface to the platform via well documented APIs (for example OpenStack API, VMware VSphere API).

We don’t have capacity to bid for something this big either. On the subject of OpenStack, I read this yesterday.

I’ll take a look and see if it’s something we can cater for

Hi All,

Looked into this and definitely something we can do, who’s the best to contact regarding this?

Would like to reach out and make contact and get discussions going?

Thanks all Have a great day :slight_smile:

Hi Liam. Time is very short now, and we didn’t take things further. But if you’d like to bid and need any particular support or collaboration, I suggest you go ahead, making clear what you need from other people. Don’t feel you have to include us.

Simon

Hi Simon,

Infrastructure and setup are not a problem we can handle that, the only
area we may need support is the configuration of software within the
environment they are requesting. If anyone here is able to support on this
side of things if tender is accepted then by all means please chime in, the
more the merrier :slight_smile:

While looking into more detail of the requirements for this tender, it would appear as though they require some elements to remain on site, no we can provide the public cloud aspect however not the on-premises, it’s rather confusing as to which they require to remain on site, however, if anyone here has the ability to cater for on premises, we can take care of the public cloud.

We have rackspace at a Sheffield datacentre which is powered by Good Energy (which would be a good fit in terms of reducing money going to the fossil fuel based sector of the economy), and we could help with things like Xen but we don’t have OpenStack experience at the moment, but would be keep to learn. The contract would have to be front loaded to cover the capital cost of the rack of servers that would be needed and to cover setup time.

Hi Chris,
We’re able to provide the off site infrastructure with open stack however I believe the requirements set out request a hybrid of both public and on site in terms of their data center (wherever that may be) we could fully host the infrastructure racks, servers, storage and network capacity at our data center in reading. Do you think they require a build at their location or could I be mistaken?
Would be great if we could work together on this!

Thanks

There is this:

Location

Tenderer Data Centres must be located in places where the
Copernicus Regulation and related delegated legislation (eg the
Copernicus Data Policy) can be enforced, ie countries that are
members of the European Union.

In terms of geographical presence, your proposal shall include at least
2 suitable locations to provide Public Cloud hosting, highlighting
synchronization and replication mechanisms existing between the
two Data Centres proposed.

That might rule out the UK as we have less than 2 years of EU membership left?

Hmmmmm the contract is for 12 months so hopefully shouldn’t be too much of
an issue, obviously I’d prefer to keep data in this country however we can
source the ability to host in Germany. Hopefully a fully private cloud for
which they are requesting based off site would be sufficient enough, it did
mention on site details within some of the other documentation provided by
them.

It isn’t viable to do a job of this nature for only 12 months, where did you get that from?

The initial URL indicates 4 years, which also seems short for something of this nature:

Estimated contract dates
Start date 18/08/2017
End date 17/08/2021

It stated in one of the documents that the minimum requirement was for 12
months.

TBH I can’t see them awarding it to a UK bid with a view to move it back into the EU in 18 months time, can you?

Ultimately that’s their call to make all we can do is put our best proposal
forward and work together along the way when we need help

But putting in a good bid would be a lot of work and since my view is that, if I were them, I wouldn’t risk awarding the contract to a UK based bid, I therefore don’t personally think it is worth bothering with, sorry.

Fair enough, but they are looking for UK based bids

So I’ve been trying to get my head round this a day and boy is it a beast of a tender. No real indications in to what they really want, However we may be able to come up with something by deadline providing we can find any bottlenecks between openstack and hardware that could hinder this setup. Anyone here knowledgeable enough with openstack that could assist would be greatly appreciated. Again infrastructure is doable but just messy. Thanks