Shared High-End Data-Centre Consultancy

JANET(UK) has selected Logica as preferred supplier.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has mounted an initiative to promote the sharing of services across the higher education sector where this would bring efficiencies or other measurable benefits.  In doing so it has funded a number of feasibility studies in the area of the sharing of data-centre facilities and services.  The “SHED” (Shared High-End Data-Centre) study is one of these.

In conducting the study there will be a need to understand the scope of data-centre services being sought by institutions, and the extent to which these can be provided as a shared service.  The original SHED concept was for shared managed co-location space at which individual institutions would house their own equipment, HPC and otherwise.  However, there is also interest in the potential; for higher-level managed services to be provided.  Managed data storage, data backup and disaster recovery are the most obvious of these, but there are clearly other possibilities.

Further information can be found in the Statement of Requirements (SoR) which is available electronically as an Adobe PDF file.

Suppliers should note that before submitting a response to the SoR they must register their intent to do this with JANET(UK).

Each potential supplier must register on the JANET(UK) e-tendering opportunities portal at https://tenders.ja.net. Each potential supplier must register as a system user if they are a first time user of the JANET(UK) portal, which is a one-off activity. Once accepted by JANET(UK), each supplier will receive a username and password that should be used for all future accesses to the system. The only time that JANET(UK) will reject a supplier is if there is an attempt to have a duplicate registration for a supplier. Also, please note that this first time registration is not a registration for a particular contract, it is only the registration of the user on the JANET(UK) portal. When username and password are received, then a supplier must log in and then register their interest in a specific contract. It is recommended that a generic mailbox (such as sales@supplier) is set up, so that information from the system can be sent to more than one representative at the company.

The steps and timetable for this procurement are as follows: