New Generation Firewall

The Requirements - Summary

De Montfort University (DMU) has a requirement for replacement Next Generation Firewall, including ongoing support & maintenance, all as per the Specification (Statement of) Requirements set out in and forming Section Two of this RfQ document. The University welcomes the identification and submission of alternative innovative solution approaches / proposals for consideration and evaluation that meet the University's specific Specification (Statement of) Requirements. All such proposed solutions will need to take account of our Minimum Standards and Essential Requirements in particular and must also meet the University's ICT Solution Requirements standards at Section Five of this RfQ document. Further information surrounding the University's Specification (Statement of) Requirements and responding to these in particular is contained at Section Two of this RfQ; please see that all information and instructions contained therein are fully read and understood before returning your completed RfQ Response.

Where submitting more than one alternative proposal for consideration please ensure that all documentation completed and submitted as part of your RfQ Response is clearly titled and referenced to this effect so as to avoid any error or misinterpretation at evaluation stage. Where submitting more than one alternative response for consideration please also be clear to identify the considered relative benefits and potential costs savings of each proposal option / Offer.

This procurement represents a mini-competition against the SUPC SLRA Framework Lot 4 Other Software. All RfQ Responses must be submitted in accordance with this Framework.

Only those suppliers present on the above mentioned Framework and Lot shall be eligible to bid for this Contract.

Bidders must ensure that they respond to all areas of the Specification (Statement of) Requirements, so as to allow for such full consideration and evaluation to take place.

De Montfort University are undertaking a procurement exercise to replace our existing Check Point firewall infrastructure and Forcepoint URL filtering solution due to the existing equipment reaching end-of-life. We have a standalone Check Point management platform, currently on version R77.30, running on our VMware infrastructure.

We currently have 5 firewall instances, comprising two high availability (HA) clusters and a standalone node. The two HA clusters service our "external" firewalls and our "internal" firewalls and the standalone node ("tenants" firewall) services a separate internet link for guests and commercial organisations located on-site.

We have a stretched layer 2/3 network between two data centres located approximately 0.5km apart, linked via 9/125 single mode fibre in our own ducts. Our network infrastructure consists of various Hewlett Packard Enterprise "A-series" switch stacks, configured as virtual switch fabrics using HP's pro...

Additional information: The Requirements - Summary

De Montfort University (DMU) has a requirement for replacement Next Generation Firewall, including ongoing support & maintenance, all as per the Specification (Statement of) Requirements set out in and forming Section Two of this RfQ document. The University welcomes the identification and submission of alternative innovative solution approaches / proposals for consideration and evaluation that meet the University's specific Specification (Statement of) Requirements. All such proposed solutions will need to take account of our Minimum Standards and Essential Requirements in particular and must also meet the University's ICT Solution Requirements standards at Section Five of this RfQ document. Further information surrounding the University's Specification (Statement of) Requirements and responding to these in particular is contained at Section Two of this RfQ; please see that all information and instructions contained therein are fully read and understood before returning your completed RfQ Response.

Where submitting more than one alternative proposal for consideration please ensure that all documentation completed and submitted as part of your RfQ Response is clearly titled and referenced to this effect so as to avoid any error or misinterpretation at evaluation stage. Where submitting more than one alternative response for consideration please also be clear to identify the considered relative benefits and potential costs savings of each proposal option / Offer.

This procurement represents a mini-competition against the SUPC SLRA Framework Lot 4 Other Software. All RfQ Responses must be submitted in accordance with this Framework.

Only those suppliers present on the above mentioned Framework and Lot shall be eligible to bid for this Contract.

Bidders must ensure that they respond to all areas of the Specification (Statement of) Requirements, so as to allow for such full consideration and evaluation to take place.

De Montfort University are undertaking a procurement exercise to replace our existing Check Point firewall infrastructure and Forcepoint URL filtering solution due to the existing equipment reaching end-of-life. We have a standalone Check Point management platform, currently on version R77.30, running on our VMware infrastructure.

We currently have 5 firewall instances, comprising two high availability (HA) clusters and a standalone node. The two HA clusters service our "external" firewalls and our "internal" firewalls and the standalone node ("tenants" firewall) services a separate internet link for guests and commercial organisations located on-site.

We have a stretched layer 2/3 network between two data centres located approximately 0.5km apart, linked via 9/125 single mode fibre in our own ducts. Our network infrastructure consists of various Hewlett Packard Enterprise "A-series" switch stacks, configured as virtual switch fabrics using HP's proprietary Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology. Within the internal network, our core switches virtualise the network layer to deliver 19 network "roles" each of which are independently managed and only connected via the "internal" firewall.

Connections are physically delivered to the current firewalls via individual physical links, or LACP port groups with tagged VLANs via the stretched layer 2 networks. Routing on the firewalls is currently defined via static policies, but a requirement exists to extend this to the use of dynamic routing protocols, namely OSPF internally and BGP externally.

As part of the implementation, we require a high availability cluster split across our two data centres, allowing virtualised firewall instances to be run for "internal", "external" and "guest" firewalls. Traffic will be delivered to the firewalls via LACP port groups consisting of a mixture of 10G SR and 10G LR fibre links to provide resilience in the event of single device or entire data centre failure. Firewall synchronisation should operate via a minimum of two separate links which will be connected between the data centres via our diverse LR fibre links.

Traffic will be delivered via 802.1Q tagged VLANs and must be separated within the firewall to deliver the specific VLANs required to the respective virtual firewall instance.

Furthermore, we would like the capability for virtual instances to be active on any node in the cluster at any time, but with a single cluster node capable of running all instances in the event of a disaster e.g. cluster node A normally runs the "internal" firewall, whilst cluster node B normally runs the "external" and "guest" firewalls.

Please note that this represents a procurement (mini-competition) against the SUPC (Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium) Software Licence Resellers Agreement (SLRA) Framework, Lot 4 Other Software and consequently only those suppliers present on that Framework / Lot are eligible for bidding for this procurement.

All details and documents in respect of this procurement can be located on: https://in-tendhost.co.uk/demontfort/aspx/Home

Is a Recurrent Procurement Type? : No