Adelaide suburbs council tenders for ageing IT infrastructure replacement

Adelaide's City of West Torrens has issued a tender calling for suppliers to replace its Dell VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure, which is reaching end of life after seven years of operation.

The council's existing active-active cluster comprises eight nodes split between its Civic Centre and Adelaide City Council's Pirie Street data centre, supported by a witness host third-party server at the council depot.

Solutions to address the council's compute and data storage requirements for at least five years are required.

The current infrastructure, installed in 2018, includes Dell/EMC VxRail E560F systems with Intel Xeon Gold 6138 processors, 384 gigabytes of memory per host, and 112 terabyte vSAN storage across eight hosts with four 10 gigabit network adapters per host.

Now, the council requires solutions that maintain or improve upon its current active-active configuration, ensuring zero recovery time objective through real-time data mirroring across nodes.

Tenderers must demonstrate their solutions provide automated full-stack lifecycle management covering BIOS, hypervisor, and vSAN components with non-disruptive updates.

Solutions must integrate with vCenter Service interface through familiar VMware administrative tools and include a health and analytics portal for monitoring and capacity planning.

The council seeks systems that can independently scale compute and storage resources without incurring additional licensing costs for storage expansion.

Support requirements include 24/7 remote technical assistance with guaranteed four-hour onsite response, single-point support for hardware and software issues, and proactive issue detection capabilities.

The backup infrastructure currently includes a Dell PowerEdge R740xd server with 14 8 TB disks running Veeam Backup & Replication, plus a Dell/EMC ML3 LTO8 tape library.

Applications running on the infrastructure include SQL databases, web services, Exchange, file services, GIS, electronic document management, print services, VMware Horizon, payroll, PABX, domain controllers, and utility servers.

The council operates 250 PCs and virtual desktop computers across its sites, connected via dark fibre links to the Regulatory Services building, library, Morphett Road depot, and Adelaide City Council data centre.

Data sovereignty requirements mandate that all information must reside within Australia, with current backup procedures maintaining end-of-month tape backups indefinitely and daily disk backups for five weeks.

The council anticipates moving some workloads to Software-as-a-Service platforms over the next three to five years whilst maintaining on-premises infrastructure requirements.

Deadline for the tender is at 2 pm on 17 June 2025, with contract commencement scheduled for 1 August 2025.