Backup, Archive and Recovery solution to Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (NATO)

Tender: The Provision of Backup, Archive and Recovery solution to STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE).

Contracting Authority: NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), La Spezia – Italy

Descriptions: CMRE requires an enterprise-grade data backup, archive and recovery solution for its unclassified data centre in La Spezia and for the smallerscale data centre installed onboard the NATO Research Vessel (NRV) Alliance. Both data centres use virtualization based on Vmware to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The systems for data backup, archive and recovery shall be supplied as a turnkey solution, inclusive of professional services for system installation, configuration, training, testing, and transition to operations.

1. Introduction: 1.1 This technical specification covers the data backup, archive and recovery systems to be utilized to safeguard CMRE’s data and information assets, to achieve the following objectives: 1.1.1 Update and improve the reliability of the CMRE unclassified data centre by implementing a state of the art data backup and archive solution at CMRE in La Spezia, Italy; 1.1.2 Implement a backup and archive system for the NATO Research Vessel (NRV) Alliance that is coherent and integrated with the backup and archive system covering the CMRE data centre, to address requirements related to CMRE’s work on the vessel. 1.2 Two components are envisioned, one to be installed at CMRE, one to be installed on NRV Alliance, to provide data backup and archive for data centres of CMRE and NRV Alliance, respectively. 1.3 The two components shall be interoperable, coherently engineered and integrated, as better detailed by the technical requirements below.
2. Description of the CMRE data centres: 2.1 CMRE is currently operating an unclassified data centre at its premises in La Spezia, Italy, composed using the following technologies: 2.1.1 Virtualization environment based on Vmware, used to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); 2.1.2 DellEMC VNX storage, used within the IaaS framework; 2.1.3 DellEMC Isilon Network Attached Storage (NAS). 2.2 A smaller-scale data centre is operated on-board NRV Alliance, with virtualization also based on Vmware, and with interconnections to CMRE using bandwidth-limited satellite links and, potentially, cabled links when in port.
3. General requirements: 3.1 This section provides an overview of general requirements applicable to the backup and archive solutions for CMRE and NRV Alliance. 3.2 A high-level diagram (Figure 1) is used to depict how the different elements tie together. An indication of the sizing of the two systems is also given, covering both the CMRE component and the NRV Alliance component. 3.3 The supplier shall provide a backup solution designed, built and implemented using elements from one single manufacturer/vendor, to minimize risks due to the integration and support of different products made by different vendors. 3.4 The backup and archive systems shall cover not only the IaaS components, but also the applications that are hosted within those infrastructure services. 3.5 The backup and archive system shall allow for backup, restore, verification and archiving of the IaaS components, to include the applications hosted on the IaaS components. 3.6 The backup and archive system shall provide periodic and ad-hoc data backup capability through a single user interface. 3.7 The backup and archive system shall provide reports and dashboards on overall backup system health, system activities and availability of the backups. 3.8 The backup and archive system shall provide replication capabilities to support continuous data protection, at the virtual machine level, to any point-in-time recovery (PITR). 3.9 The backup and archive system shall provide built-in capability to perform disaster recovery orchestration workflows. 3.10 The backup and archive system shall be composed of the following tiers: 3.10.1 Near-term (6 Months) (online); and 3.10.2 support to cloud tier solutions. 3.11 The backup and archive system shall be non-disruptive to the functionality and performance of the IaaS Components and of the backup target. 3.12 The backup and archive system shall have the capability of being integrated with IaaS Automation and Orchestration System for scheduling any job that can be executed in the backup and archiving system. 3.13 The backup and archive system shall provide reports on performance and capacity of the system. 3.14 The backup and archive system shall have the following functionalities: 3.14.1 Is managed and monitored centrally; 3.14.2 Has the ability to prioritize backup/restore tasks; 3.14.3 Has the ability to schedule full and incremental backups; 3.14.4 Has the ability to assign role based access for various admin roles; 3.14.5 Has the ability to do integrity checking, encryption, compression and deduplication; and 3.14.6 Supports compression. 3.15 The backup and archive system shall be able to process (i.e. backup, restore, verify and archive) all user data, applications data and system data, including but not limited to: 3.15.1 All operating systems (OS) supported by the Hypervisor component on a Virtual machine or running on a physical server; 3.15.2 All Virtual Machine (VM) and OS templates; 3.15.3 Databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc., and Hadoop; 3.15.4 All User data hosted on any one of the nodes. 3.16 The backup and archive system shall ensure that data that is currently on-line and in use (open files, databases, information stores, running VM’s, etc.) can be backed up or archived while staying online. The back up operations shall not cause the application or user to lose the connection to the data source. 3.17 The backup and archive system shall provide the following granularity or Recovery Level Objectives (RLO): 3.17.1 File shares: single file; 3.17.2 Database: single record, log files, database; 3.17.3 OS: system state, log files and OS image. 3.18 Sizing – CMRE Data Centre 3.18.1 The solution for CMRE shall be dimensioned appropriately for the backup of 290 TB front-end capacity, divided as follows: 3.18.1.1 210 TB NAS (DellEMC ISILON) 3.18.1.2 20 TB RDBMS 3.18.1.3 60 TB Vmware 3.19 Sizing – NRV Alliance 3.19.1 The solution for NRV Alliance shall be dimensioned appropriately for the backup of 20 TB frontend capacity on a Vmware farm.
4. Mandatory technical requirements for backup & archive solutions: 4.1 The systems for data backup and archive shall be supplied as a turnkey solution, inclusive of professional services for system installation, configuration, training, testing, and transition to operations. 4.2 Mandatory technical requirements are listed in the tables below. 4.3 Requirements falling in category “General Requirement” (“General Req.” in the table, IDs # 1.1-1.37) are applicable to both the CMRE and NRV Alliance systems, and both systems shall be compliant with those characteristics. 4.4 Additional requirements are given for the CMRE solution (IDs # 2.1-2.7) and for the NRV Alliance solution (IDs # 3.1-3.5), and the systems proposed for the two locations shall be compliant with those additional characteristics.

Deadline Nov 12 – 10:00