Cambridgeshire County Council Application Centric Infrastructure

Cambridgeshire County Council invites proposals from experienced and qualified Contractors for the provision of everything required including all skilled labour, tools, materials, equipment for supply, delivery and implementation of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology inside a shared datacentre located in Peterborough. The ACI infrastructure needs to integrate with existing and new traditional non-ACI networks, located at Peterborough City Council or Cambridgeshire County Council partner datacentres (at Northamptonshire County Council and Milton Keynes Council), and virtualisation technologies such as VMware or Hyper-V The current Cambridgeshire County Council datacentre network is a relatively flat design that provides limited security and control for lateral (east west) traffic movement within the datacentre.

In addition, the current network design requires a significant amount of hands on management, and provides little in the way of automation and orchestration. The aim is to improve, consolidate and simplify datacentre operations.

The Cambridgeshire County Council strategic partnership, along with a shared joint senior management team, with Peterborough City Council has led to a joint ICT strategy which incorporates building and developing a shared services infrastructure located at the Peterborough City Council datacentre. The shared infrastructure will be the enabler to deliver excellent public services to the residents of Peterborough and Cambridgeshire.

To solve these problems, Cambridgeshire County Council has elected to implement, and build upon existing ACI foundations that Peterborough City Council have already established, by using Cisco's ACI technology within the datacentre. Cambridgeshire County Council are accepting a proposal for both the supply of Cisco ACI and traditional non-ACI networking equipment, and complete implementation and support, of ACI on an existing Peterborough City Council ACI environment which integrates with a new traditional (non-ACI) networking environment in Peterborough with Cambridgeshire County Council partners.