HomeMy WebLinkAboutCITY OF WATERLOO ENTERPRISE NETWORK EQUIPMENT & SERVICES - Questions with AnswersDate
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Contractor Company
Hypertec
Hypertec
Davenport Group
Hypertec
Hypertec
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Hypertec
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Davenport Group
Representative
David Rodriguez
Emmanuela Beckley
Jackson Larson
David Rodriguez
David Rodriguez
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
David Rodriguez
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Megan Amin
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Jackson Larson
Email
drodriguez@hypertec.com
ebeckley@hypertec.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
drodriguez@hypertec.com
drodriguez@hypertec.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
drodriguez@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
mamin@hypertec.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Jackson.Larson@davenportgroup.com
Question
Does the city need the bidder to designate locations for, and/or build-out, the data centers?
Is the city going to be provide racks or will the bidder be required to provide them?
What power is available?
Will the city or the bidder be responsible for layout out cold/hot aisles?
Is the City's fiber buildout project aligned with the November 15th completion requirement?
Will there be any sizing methodology or sizing information for server storage and backup piece of this RFP?
Is this tight turnaround by November 15th with an award date of August 17th realistic?
Can we also submit questions with regards to any of the stuff outside of this call, you know, just put it in there before the drop dead date or the timeline?
Is there any consequence or any ramifications if that timeline isn't met?
In section 3.7, it mentions a price hold requirement for 90 days following the deadline for proposal submissions. What we've been hearing from a lot of manufacturers is there's some
volatility from this is the price that we expect it to be versus a drastically higher price when it ships. Is there any flexibility with that price hold requirement of 90 days? Or
is that a hard and fast rule that needs to be?
Can you elaborate if it's truly a hard and fast one winner for the contract, or will partial bids be accepted at that point, or partial awards be given?
To clarify, on exhibit B, looking at 5.6 OPT1, is that optional or option?
In section 3.5.1, looking for some clarification on the monthly invoices. Can you elaborate a bit on what that means on a monthly invoice? Is the contractor, the VAR that wins the bid
expected to send monthly invoices based on progress? Is it going to be based on when you know the invoice in terms of that specific VAR? What is that? What is that expectation?
Regarding monthly invoicing, are you making an assumption that the seller will hold the gear and bill it monthly like a true managed service? Or are you looking at the, and maybe include
that hardware will be procured and then invoicing as the professional services monthly?
Can professional services be provided by a named subcontractor under the prime VAR, and does that satisfy the "employees of Seller" requirement in Exhibit A Section 4?
Is a phased delivery approach acceptable given the size of this project? Are there specific sites that need to be up first, and does the November 15deadline apply to all 263 sites or
just an initial set?
For the 205 P4 utility and traffic cabinet sites: who controls physical access? Is fiber already terminated and tested at each site? Are TRENDnet switches already installed, or does
the Seller provide and install them?
Is the separate storm/sanitary network shown in Attachment A in scope for this RFP? Does it share the HPE 6300 aggregation infrastructure, or does it need its own? Are TRENDnet switches
already deployed at those sites?
The proposed storage architecture requires a third-site witness to enable automatic failover between the two data centers. Is a cloud-hosted witness (AWS or Azure, US region) acceptable
under the City's CJIS and data sovereignty requirements? Does the City have an existing cloud tenancy, or would the Seller set one up? Is there an existing third municipal facility
that could host it instead?
Section 5.5 defines base installation as up to five city sites and up to five ERPS rings. Are these specific sites identified during design, or any five from each group? Should optional
per-site and per-ring pricing go in Exhibit B or a separate schedule?
Does the pre-installation site survey require physical visits to all 263 sites, or just the data centers and designated install sites? Is Owner-supplied documentation available for the
remaining locations?
Section 5.6 references 40+ VMs. Can the City provide a VM inventory with total count, OS types, application roles, storage consumed, and acceptable downtime per VM? Please flag any public
safety or SCADA workloads that require zero-downtime migration.
What is the specific Dell EMC storage model currently in use, and what is the total consumed capacity? Is the SAN fabric Fibre Channel or iSCSI? This is needed to develop the migration
plan for Exhibit C.
Is mobile device backup (Android and iOS) a firm requirement, or would a documented scope exception be acceptable? Are devices enrolled in an MDM platform like Intune or Jamf? Approximately
how many devices are in scope?
Does the City use Microsoft 365 for email, SharePoint, or Teams? If so, is backup of M365 data a requirement of this RFP, or is it protected through another mechanism? The proposed on-premises
backup platform does not cover M365 cloud data.
The RFP describes Old City Hall as a possible temporary connection pending City Hall relocation, to be abandoned by mid-2027. Can the City confirm whether Old City Hall is in scope as
a permanent third data center or temporary connectivity only? If temporary, what is the expected sequence, and is decommissioning of Old City Hall equipment in scope or a separate engagement?
How many Windows and macOS physical endpoints need to be backed up? Should virtual desktops be included? Is there an existing endpoint backup platform in place, and is the preference
to replace it or integrate with it?
The proposed network element management platform (Aruba Central) is cloud-based and will manage equipment carrying CJIS-regulated traffic. Has the City evaluated Aruba Central against
CJIS Cloud Policy requirements? If cloud-based management is not acceptable, would an on-premises alternative be considered?
How many devices at each data center require out-of-band access? Are the Owner-supplied Fortinet firewalls included in that scope? Do management VMs also need OOB access?
How long is the acceptance testing period expected to take? Does ATP need to be completed before the November 2 test site turn-up, or can it run concurrently? Is the storm/sanitary network
included in the same ATP plan?
What format is expected for Day 2 training (instructor-led, lab-based, recorded, or a mix)? How many attendees, and what is the preferred total duration? Are vendor-supplied training
materials acceptable, or does the City require custom site-specific materials?
Is as-built documentation required for all 263 sites, or only the sites where the Seller performs installation? What formats are acceptable, and does the City have a preferred documentation
template?
Can the $3 million cyber liability requirement be satisfied through a combination of primary cyber and umbrella coverage, or is a standalone $3 million primary policy required?
For a phased delivery, will monthly invoicing be tied to project milestones or wave completion, or prorated evenly across the implementation period?
Is the City expecting two independent VMware clusters with Live Site Recovery failover, or a stretched metro cluster with synchronous replication and automatic failover? This drives
licensing, replication design, and the third-site witness requirement.
The proposed compute design uses 16-core CPUs (192 total physical cores across both data centers). Do current or planned workloads require higher core counts per host (24 or 32-core)?
This is one of the biggest drivers of VMware subscription cost.
Section 5.6 references vSAN as an example storage solution, but the two storage options described are both external arrays. Is the City's intent an external array architecture, a vSAN
hyperconverged architecture, or are both acceptable?
What is the City's required backup retention schedule (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly), and does it vary by workload type such as public safety or SCADA versus general administrative
systems? Retention policy is the primary driver of backup storage sizing.
Section 5.4 specifies HPE 6300 aggregation switches with 50GE uplinks to HPE 8360 core routers. Should those uplinks run at native 50GE, via QSFP56 breakout, or at 25GE on SFP28 interfaces?
Can you please provide a VMware workload profile that is inclusive of the Server performance, Storage requirements, and backup policies/retention?
Can you please provide a payment schedule as it pertains to Section 3.5.1
In relation to the price hold statement in section 3.7, some vendors are issuing quotes that are only valid for 7 days. In the event a bidder wins and needs to update pricing based on
OEM quoting terms/validity, will that be acceptable? Or will the price entered in the bid be the one that needs to be locked in for the 90-day period?
Will bids be accepted that include vendor and/or distribution services to assist with installation?
Is the networking configuration expected to be completed in phases? If so, do we need to plan to support the current 1 Gb connections as we transition to the 10 Gb connections?
Can you clarify what type of fiber is expected, single-mode, multi-mode, etc.,
Response
This project is a total infrastructure replacement and an expansion from a single data center and VMware compute/storage cluster to geo-diverse data centers with full network and system
redundancy. The city has already constructed the data centers and inside plant (ISP). The RFP requires two data centers in the architecture - the Public Works Building and the existing
City Hall building, or possibly a new City Hall building location with a temporary uplink to the old one; these are described in Section 1.1 of the RFP and designated in Exhibit D,
where you'll see the data center sites highlighted in green.
The existing data centers and ISP have been constructed by the city, and the city will be responsible for any additional ISP work required. The awarded contractor for this project will
be responsible to perform a pre-installation site survey to develop a list of installation requirements, recommendations, and materials for mounting and installing equipment, and the
City will be responsible for procuring them directly through their own local sources or through the contractor.
The City will provide a Live Optics report for the existing cluster.
Lead times for the enterprise equipment were around 60 days in early spring and the schedule was built around that. If that has changed in the present environment we will discuss adjustments
with the awarded bidder. The installation site survey and high level design work in the Section 4 pro services component would be performed in parellel. The RFP only requires five city
sites and five ERPS rings to be brought online by the contractor and the City will take care of the remaining conversion over time.
Yes, email to Mike Regan, mregan@entrustsol.com, with a copy to Chris Youngblut, chris.youngblut@waterloo-ia.org.
There are no contractual penalties in view, however, the bid evaluation criteria will consider the bidder's response to the desired timeline. The City would be willing to work with the
winning bidder on adjusted schedules, if the timeframes are reasonable.
There is no flexibility on the 90-day price hold requirement. The City must have confidence in the proposed pricing for the duration of the evaluation / decision period.
By nature of the project and the complexity, this is an integrated bid requiring a single VAR to provide the materials and the services.
It is option 1 of two solicited options for the city to select from. The RFP solicits several optional components, not all of which will not affect the base price evaluation as indicated
in the RFP language.
The payment schedule in Section 3.4 will be jointly developed during contract negotiations with the awarded bidder in the following way:
3.4.1 Payment schedule will be jointly developed between Owner and Seller to align with completion and acceptance of project milestones.
3.4.2 Seller agrees to submit invoices aligned with the agreed upon payment schedule and accept payment in the form of check or ACH.
The payment schedule in Section 3.4 will be jointly developed during contract negotiations with the awarded bidder in the following way:
3.4.1 Payment schedule will be jointly developed between Owner and Seller to align with completion and acceptance of project milestones.
3.4.2 Seller agrees to submit invoices aligned with the agreed upon payment schedule and accept payment in the form of check or ACH.
You may propose a subcontractor for the professional services and respond "N" to "Work performed by employees of Seller?" in Exhibit A Section 4 if none are employees or "P" if some
are employees. The roles and skillsets of the employees should be listed in this case.
RFP Section 1.7 states: Project Completion shall be defined as the Proposed Solution being fully deployed and operational across City Hall and Public Works data centers, designated city
sites and utility/traffic cabinets being connected, virtual workloads migrated to the new compute/storage system, completion of acceptance testing, and delivery of training/documentation.
There will be five designated city sites and five ERPS rings included in the Project Completion.
The City controls physical access. Fiber will be terminated and tested at the utility and traffic sites on the five designated ERPS rings. The city will supply and install the TRENDnet
switches, but also solicits optional pricing from the bidders if they are able to supply them. The awarded bidder is responsible for designing, integrating, and testing the ERPS rings
as part of their professional services bid.
The separate storm/sanitary network on Attachment A is in scope for this RFP and will contain it's own aggregation switches and citiy-provided firewalls for connection to the shared
aggregation network. TRENDnet switches are already installed at some of the P4 sites, and will be installed by the city at each site on the five designated ERPS rings.
The city does not have CJIS requirements as we do not cover the police department operations as part of this RFP.
The five city sites and five ERPS rings will be jointly identified and designated during the pre-installation survey and high level design phases of the professional services. Per-site
and per-ring pricing is welcomed and may be submitted on Exhibit B as an optional service for the city to consider beyond the five designated sites and ERPS rings.
Site surveys will be conducted only at the P1 sites and the designated P2/P3/P4 sites. The remaining locations will be deployed by the city after project completion.
See #3 above.
3 VM Hosts + Dell/ECM SC5020 (see Live Optics report)
Mobile device backup will not be a requirement (optional)
City uses Microsoft 365 - option to backup M365 data not required.
Old City Hall will need to be the temporary site of one of the data center. Equipment will need to be moved in 2027 (tbd)
Backup of physical endpoints (ie. End user workstations) not required.
CJIS requirements not applicable. All network management assumed to be on premise.
All network core, aggregation, firewall, and compute/storage components at all P1 sites and Waste Management require OOB access to local console services. VMs require the ability to
remote restart from the OOB console.
ATP is assumed to take place between Nov 2 and Nov 15. the storm/sanitary network is inclluded in the same ATP.
Day 2 operational training is expected to take place onsite, on the installed network, and using the supplied documentation. Training should focus on typical IT operational practices
including hardware/service provisioning, maintenance routines, performance monitoring, and diagnostic practices for the installed network, management systems, and compute/storage solution.
As-built documentation is only required for sites installed by the Seller as part of the Project Completion.
Total Cyber coverage could be procured through underlying and umbrella policies. However the umbrella (or excess) policy does include Cyber as underlying.
See #10 above
Real-time or near real-time failover (ok with some user intervention) between data centers is the expectation. Optional methods will be assessed as part of the review of proposals. Lower
ongoing licensing costs is preferred.
Currently the city has Vmware Vcenter and Vsphere standard subscription licensing for 96 instances/cores. Currently on v8. Live Optics report will be provided.
The intent is an external array.
(Minimum requirements are: Daily backups of all servers for 3 days…. 1 weekly, 1 monthly and 1 yearly)
The aggregation network uplinks must support a minimum of 50Gbps either on individual ports or LAG interfaces.
See #3 above.
See #10 above.
See #7 above.
Yes, but Attachment A must reflect this in answer to related compliance items (ie. Section 4, etc.).
The existing city network must be interconnected with the new network to maintain continued operations while the city converts and migrates remaining sites over time.
Single mode
Response Date
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