The Bank of England has chosen a storage area network (SAN) from EMC to support its storage requirements for the next five years, awarding the company a £1 million contract for the initial provision of 70 terabytes-worth of capacity.
The systems should be expandable up to 900 terabyes, the tender reveals, and should account for the addition of virtual desktop infrastructure in the future. Specifically, it should be able to support 3,500 virtual desktops with no drop in performance.
One of the characterisitcs that help EMC win the contract was its ability "to demonstrate strategic partnerships with other vendors enabling adaption of the system for automated self contained provisioning on demand utilising virtual technology should we choose to offer that service". This may well refer to its partnership with virtualisaiton provider VMware, of which it is the majority owner.
The implementation of the system beings this month, starting with what is described in the contract document as a "building block" enterprise system from which to grow the rest of the storage architecture.
A contract award notice published on the EU’s electronic tenders registry reveals that one of the Band of England’s primary requirements was the ability to introduce the new storage equipment gradully, swapping out legacy systems as it grows.
Information Age has contacted BoE for further comment.
