Parliamentary Services through its body corporate, the Parliamentary Corporation, has issued a request for proposal from hosting service providers willing to supply a North Island remote disaster recovery site, including network infrastructure and services.
The Parliamentary Service, established in 2000 to provide administrative support and services to the House of Representatives and to members of parliament, already has an IT Disaster Recovery environment within the parliamentary campus.
This uses a virtual server environment and Storage Area Network (SAN) to provide a hot standby environment in the event of system failure. With that environment established and stable, the service wishes to move the environment to a remote site in the central or northern part of the North Island. For security reasons, communication between the parliamentary campus and the DR hosting site must be via the Government Shared Network (GSN).
The successful host will provide suitable IT hosting facilities for the Parliamentary Service's ICT DR hot standby environment, as well as for staged expansion of the site as other parliamentary agencies migrate into it.
Included in the contract will be on-going service and maintenance of the facility provided through a service level agreement with the Parliamentary Service. This will likely be a four-year contract (three years plus one).