Call: Data Backup Solution
Contracting Authority: International Telecommunication Union, Geneve
Deadline 18/4
Front-end Capacity Estimate on Backup Storage Device (Projected usage for 5 Years): 117 TB in the total.
Technical Requirements for the Backup Solution
General Requirements
Architecture
It is mandatory for the bidder to provide the architecture of the Backup System as follows:
Backup system with one physical hardware backup device at Primary Site in Geneva, Switzerland and a cloud backup system at Secondary Site (either Azure or AWS).
The bidder shall present the architecture of the Backup System in the Technical Proposal with diagrams and major components of the system clearly labelled including the backup components on the cloud.
At both Primary and Secondary Sites, data restore shall be performed independently of the other site.
The backup solution should have flexible licensing that would allow backup of on-premise assets and the cloud assets with the same license (i.e., the license is flexible to adjust as assets are migrated from onpremise to the clouds or vice-versa).
Data Protection
The Backup System shall protect data (back up data so that restore can then be performed when needed) on both physical and virtual machines (for both onpremises and cloud environments) and make it possible to perform disaster recovery in case of catastrophic failures.
The front-end capacity of the Backup Storage Device to hold source data is 120 TB. The evolution of data capacity is shown in Table 1-CAP below.
The retention policies envisaged are shown in Table 1-RET below.
ITU will have 400 virtual machines in total that need to be backed up by the end of the fifth year of this project.
Retention policy shall be easy to be set up.
Where is the index catalog stored?
The system shall:
- Facilitate quick search and restore of vital records files for DR purposes.
- Facilitate legal hold situations to preserve data for legal purposes.
- Facilitate eDiscovery on backed up data.
- Auditing functions.
- Facilitate recovery from ransomware situations.
Data Storage Reduction
Bidder shall mention the compression, deduplication, or track change block technologies that are used for reduction of data volume and effects or limitations of such technologies (if any).
Granular Restore
Allow for backup/restore at multiple levels, e.g.:
• Snapshot-based recovery of virtual machines through virtual machine host such as VMWare ESXi and Hyper-V.
• File/Folder/Objects for both Linux and Windows operating systems
Role-Base Access
Role-based access based on Microsoft Active Directory is required for different roles in the backup process.
Users shall be able to restore their own data where possible (i.e., for files and folders).
Virtualization Support
Support is needed for the following:
• ITU has 18 x Hyper-V hosts + 8 x VMWare hosts each with two physical processors each.
• ITU has virtualization environments of VMWare ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V, and supported operating systems are Microsoft Windows 2012 R2/2016/2019 and CentOS/RedHat 5,6,7,8.
Work Profiles
Backup workloads or systems that must be supported by the new Backup System:
• Microsoft Active Directory
• Microsoft SQL Server
• UNIX/Linux File Systems
• VMware vSphere, ESXi
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Windows Server
• CentOS Server
• Backup and recovery of physical and virtual machines (Windows Server and CentOS Server)
• Support for major cloud vendors
Support for major storage snapshot vendors is a plus.
Bidder shall explain how application consistency is achieved.
The bidder shall write a comment if any of the above is not supported by the proposed system and what is the best way to backup that workload in such cases.
ITU does not use encrypted databases, encrypted file systems and disk volumes and does not plan to use them in the next 5 years.
Hardware Requiremets
Capacity
The frontend capacity of the Backup Storage Device to hold source data is 120 TB. The evolution of data capacity is shown in Table 1-CAP.
Based on this frontend capacity and retention schedule given in Table 1-RET, the bidder has to calculate and show the logical data protected at the backend of the hardware.
The bidder shall state the raw capacity and useable capacity of the two physical backup devices.
The bidder shall fill in Annex 7 to show how it has calculated the various capacities.
For hardware devices, all requisite storage shall be delivered at the beginning of the project.
Conformity to Capacity Requirements
At any point of operation within the next 5 years of support, if the effective capacity of Backup Storage Device is not sufficient to protect the source data volume with the Required Retention Schedule, the successful bidder shall do the necessary (including adding hardware/software/licensing) to make the useable capacity match the promised useable capacity, at no additional cost or expense to ITU.
The bidder’s commitment in this regard is mandatory. [ Part of PASS/FAIL Criteria ]
Redundancy
All hardware systems must be designed without single point of failures.
In addition to redundancy features including at a minimum, redundant power, fans and RAID, the Backup Storage Devices must have two disk controllers for redundancy. Hot-plug disks, spare disks shall be used as necessary.
iSCSI-based synchronizations or transfers are discouraged.
Physical Space
As datacenter floor space is a premium, Backup devices that occupies less floor space and rack units (RU) is preferred.
The bidder shall state the rack units that each backup device occupies. Height, Length and Width H x L x W of the hardware devices should be clearly mentioned.
ITU uses a standard 19-inch rack.
Technical Information
The bidder shall state the exact hardware model of the backup devices or storage that is being offered.
Datasheet of the proposed hardware; detailed description, other technical details of hardware with model numbers, physical dimensions, and power requirements of the proposed system shall be provided.
Backup and Restore Performance
The bidder shall provide throughput of the hardware backup storage device in TB/hour format.
RPO in general is for 24 hours for backup data and VMs.
For the proposed configuration the bidder shall provide RTO estimates (in minutes or hours) for restoring 5 virtual machines of 500 GB capacity each in the cloud when restoring data (a) from 1 week ago (b) from 8 weeks ago.
The bidder can cite additional restore scenarios to highlight how its product achieves high performance for on-prem backup/restore scenario.
Information on End of Support dates (including End of Software Maintenance and End of Service Contract Renewal) for the model of hardware proposed. Should the dates not be available, the Bidder shall clearly mention why.
Cloud Requirements
Compatibility
The solution shall be fully compatible with at least the Azure and AWS clouds.
Capacity
Based on this frontend capacity and retention schedule given in Table 1-RET, the bidder has to calculate and show the logical data protected at the backend of the cloud showing the hot tier and archive tier separately.
For cloud storage, auto-tiering feature is highly desirable.
Backup and Restore Performance
RPO in general is for 24 hours for backup data and VMs.
For the proposed configuration the bidder shall provide RTO estimates (in minutes or hours) for restoring 5 virtual machines of 500 GB capacity each in the cloud when restoring data (a) from active tier (b) from archive tier.
The bidder can cite additional restore scenarios to highlight how its product achieves high performance for cloud backup/restore scenario.
Bidder should explain how servers can be restored individually and on mass scale on the cloud.
Data Protection Functionalities
The system shall:
• Facilitate quick search and restore of vital records files for DR purposes.
• Facilitate legal hold situations to preserve data for legal purposes.
• Facilitate eDiscovery on backed up data.
• Auditing functions.
• Facilitate recovery from ransomware situations.
Components
The bidder shall clearly state what cloud resources have been included in this offer and what cloud have not been included.
For the cloud resources that have not been included in this offer:
• In the Technical Section, the bidder shall list the quantity and size of each of the cloud resources needed (such as VM parameters of the appliance, cloud storage size in TB for hot tier and cloud storage size in TB for archive tier, etc).
• In the Commercial Section, the bidders shall give ITU the yearly estimated cost for each of the cloud resources needed using standard list price from Microsoft Azure. This is for ITU to see the overall 5-year TCO for the solution.
Software Requirements
SW and Licences
For both the hardware and cloud components, all software and licenses needed for the full operation, including the following shall be included in the Proposal as integral part of it:
• deduplication, compression, encryption
• management
• monitoring
• remote “call-home” monitoring
• snapshot (if any)
• reporting.
The migration of virtual machines between onpremise and cloud shall be at no further cost to ITU in terms of licensing.
System Mngmt And Reporting Facility
For both the hardware and cloud components, all technical management / administration of the system and necessary tools, including reporting tools, shall be included. Any limitations to the reporting software shall be mentioned (limit on volume of data, limit on number of past years that can be included in reports).
Management of the system shall be done with friendly interface including web interface.
The Bidder shall provide electronic copies of the system management documentation, manuals, etc.
Service Requirements
Project Mngmt
The Bidder is responsible for the management of the project as a whole.
A project plan shall be mutually agreed between the Bidder and ITU before being implemented.
Support Service Package (5 yrs)
The Bidder shall provide a Support Service package including the following for 5 years (3+1+1):
The Bidder shall describe response time details for different severity levels.
Technical support by telephone shall be available on 24×7 basis with access to qualified product specialists with a ticketing system.
Onsite presence of the qualified engineer as well as arrival of required replacement parts to ITU Geneva is required within next business day.
Critical problems will require a Technical Account Manager to handle them. Critical problems are those that adversely affect business, or have the potential to do so; some examples are given below:
– Data corruption, data loss, data not available
– System crash or hang
– Data is at high risk of potential loss or interruption
The supplier shall replace defective parts and ship them to ITU, Geneva premises and then install/replace them on site.
The supplier shall provide remote “call-home” monitoring and repair service on 24x7x365 basis for the supplier to monitor and act on preventive maintenance.
Installation of new software releases or software patches shall be done by the supplier, either remotely or on-site as appropriate. (If the patch update can easily be initiated by ITU staff, it is acceptable but the ultimate responsibility of patching lies with the bidder.)
ITU shall have the rights to all new software/firmware releases.
The Bidder’s support services shall be based in Switzerland.
The bidder shall present the datasheet of the proposed Support Services.
Installation Services
Installation Services:
• Physical installation, racking & cabling of the backup servers and storage devices.
• Installation of software and licenses;
• Configuration of disk pools, RAID groups, management console, etc. to ready them for Backup usage;
• Configuration of servers, hypervisors in line with the vendor best practices (bidder to move a few Windows physical servers to new Backup System and ITU staff will move the rest);
• Installation of remote “call-home” monitoring, reporting tools;
• Performance tuning as necessary.
• The bidder must indicate how many mandays of work the bidder plans to spend on-site at ITU.
Knowledge transfer to ITU staff.
Cloud components installation and configuration
• Acceptance tests.
Pre-requisites
Any pre-requisites that ITU needs to fulfill for the on-premise and cloud installations need to be clearly mentioned by the bidder.
Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge transfer to ITU staff can be done during the Installation phase.
Knowledge transfer includes data and server recoveries on-prem and on cloud (restoring individual servers and restoring servers on mass scale).
Delivery Schedule
The physical devices of the Backup System shall be delivered by 30th of August, 2022.
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