Managed Hosting Service

The closing date for the submission of responses to this RFI has been extended till 11 September 2015, 17:00 hrs.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS - III Questions 1: “Please confirm that a Company that doesn’t apply to this RFI stage will have the possibility to participate to the related RFP stage.” Answers to Question 1 The purpose of the RFI is to seek information and proposals from qualified vendors to provide options for the managed hosting services. Depending on the responses received FAO will determine if a tender process is to be undertaken. The tender could be an open solicitation, any vendor can submit a proposal or it could be a restricted tender, based on the responses received in response to the RFI, where only pre-identified vendors will be invited to submit a proposal.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS - II Questions 1: “Can organizations who do not manage their own datacentres but have ability to create and manage cloud data centres and provide remote infrastructure management services for both cloud and traditional data centres participate in this RFI?” Answers to Question 1 FAO will consider proposals from Organizations that offer value added managed hosting services based upon a utility computing/private cloud products. The proposal must show how the solution incorporating cloud services meets the requirements specified. Question 2: “We understand Requirement 13.1 (TIA-942 Tier 3 or Tier 4 datacentre compliant) is applicable only for vendors who would be bidding for data centre creation and physical infrastructure management. If a vendor only has remote infrastructure management capabilities, these compliances wouldn’t apply. Please confirm our understanding is correct” Answers to Question 2: FAO is not looking for remote infrastructure management capabilities which would manage te organization’s current in-HQ data centre. FAO is looking for a complete managed hosting service off-site. On the TIA-942 requirement a utility computing based solution ideally would need to show that the underlying cloud datacentres are compliant. Question 3: “Are you open for using Private Cloud Infrastructure from leading cloud service providers like Microsoft, Amazon or IBM instead of outsourced data centres?” Answer to Questions 3: Yes. Please refren to question no.1. Question 4: “Can a vendor participate in RFI process if it has only cloud offerings or only data centre offerings” Answer to Questions 4: Yes. This RFI is about managed hosting services. Cloud offerings are only relevant where managed hosting services are provided through a cloud infrastructure. Question 5: “The Requirements section of the RFI elaborates in sufficient details your datacentre requirements but cloud requirements are not clearly specified. Can you elaborate requirements specific to cloud infrastructure?” Answer to Questions 5: Requirements for cloud utility computing will, if necessary, be part of a separate process. Question 6: “Who will be responsible for migration from current systems to new provider?, Will professional services be required for this task?” Answer to Questions 6: In the likely event that high level managed hosting services are required by the RFP then migration will necessarily be a joint project. In this case the RFP will make provisions for moving applications under managed hosting. We would welcome suggestions in response to this RFI on how best to structure this professional services part. An obvious way would be to establish through the RFP daily rates for the profiles typically needed in start-up. At the other extreme of utility computing, there would be little need for set-up assistance other than maybe service desk support to backstop technical problems encountered. Question 7: “Will communications be required to interconnect existing Data Centers?, if yes, What kind of communications (MPLS, VPN over public Internet ...) In published requirements (Annex I), point 19.6 FAO refers to inter-communication of Data Centers as “Provide high speed link ie. MPLS or site to site VPN connectivity with stringent SLAs to FAO HQ or/and other FAO offices”. We need to clarify If these costs will be included in future RFP, confirm FAO locations and specific requirements (latency …) that will affect systems.” Answer to Question 7: The organization does not aim to buy connectivity between its datacenters or between its datacenters and decentralised offices through this procurement process. Our datacenters and offices will need to be able to connect to the Managed Hosting. We would welcome information on the options you can provide and relative pros and cons. FAO will endeavour to fully specify the required connection endpoints and performance requirements including latency in the RFP. Question 8: “In addition to ticket system, any other integrations between FAO and provider are considered?. What ticket system has at present FAO?” Answer to Question 8: FAO has a LANDesk based ticketing system. We envisage this being used to raise tickets with our Managed Hosting supplier in the future. We also use SharePoint to share information with external collaborators.

Questions and Answers - I Questions 1: “Is it possible to participate as a consortium and in positive case which are the rules we have to follow?Our company is a registered vendor in UNGM ; even the partner shall be registered? And the information we have to provide should be the sum of the consortium members data?” Question 2: “Could the application be made as a Consortium? If yes, should the administrative documentation be presented by both the members of the Consortium or just from the leader of the Consortium?” Answers to Question 1 and 2: Please be advised that FAO will consider submissions received from consortia. The purpose of the RFI is to identify and obtain information about the potential vendors that could provide managed hosting services. Detailed requirements regarding participation of consortia will be provided at tender stage. Question 3: “We inform you that we could not find both the Annex 2 and Annex 3 cited in FAO RFI for Managed Hosting Services (FAO/RFI/2015/CIO-01-PA)” Answer to Questions 3: “Annex 2 - list of physical and virtual servers as well as applications hosted in FAO data-centers” and “Annex 3 - list of the applications running in the existing FAO data-centers” will be provided at the tender stage as they contain detailed information of the FAO’s business.