ASIC seeks better backup partner

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has released a tender for the supply and maintenance of a back-up solution for its fleet of x86 and Solaris-based (UNIX) servers.

The corporate watchdog is seeking an authorised reseller of Symantec backup products to provide "additional licenses and ongoing support services" for the next three to five years as part of its "Enterprise Backup and Recovery Project", which aims to provide ASIC with "data protection from accidental loss or corruption caused by application errors or unintended deletions."

The main aims of the project are to reduce downtime, meet data integrity compliance requirements, and make ASIC more efficient due to shorter backup windows and reduced management requirements.

In tender document filings, ASIC specified the desire to purchase licences for Symantec's NetBackUp product across 72 UNIX servers, 18 Windows servers (virtualised using VMware' ESX) and 75 client machines.

This infrastructure is housed in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Traralgon. The six sites are connected via Optus' MPLS network (running at between 3 and 10 Gbps, depending on the city).

The corporate regulator is also purchasing 35 application and database packs for its SQL, Lotus Notes and Oracle systems, 147 licences for Symantec's Backup Reporter monitoring application and 42 licences for Symantec's Puredisk deduplication software for the deduplication of approximately 42 terabytes of data storage.

In addition, ASIC will acquire 18 licences each for Symantec's Storage Foundation, Cluster File System, and Volume Replicator.

Potential tenders are asked to provide a quote for "essential support" services around the Symantec solution for the next three years, with two additional optional periods of twelve months. Under "Essential Support", a support provider would be expected to respond within 30 minutes to a "severity one" problem and provide telephone access to Symantec Support Engineers on a 24/7/365 basis.

Tenders are also asked to quote for additional support for upgrades or "critical on-site support".

The winning tender would also be asked to supply "other products in the Symantec product suite as required during the contract period", but would not necessarily be contracted for systems integration work or the provision of hardware.

ASIC said the "total volume of the data backup will be of the order of 250TB [terabyte] in size."

The tender documents also revealed that ASIC is planning to operate at a virtualisation ratio of around 10 guests to every host on its x86 fleet (ten virtual machines to even piece of server hardware). The servers housing these virtual machines are running in a dual CPU, quad-core configuration with 150 gigabytes of disk space.