Resilience
It is equally vital that you specify some minimum resilience requirements. If the resilience of the system is poor so it is not available when staff need to access documents then you will not achieve the business benefits that you require from the solution and ultimately the project will fail. Hence high resilience is just as important a requirement as high performance.
However, it is also a difficult requirement and contractually it is hard to put all the risk onto a supplier as they will be implementing their solution on your networks and your desktops. Hence if the system does not meet its availability targets it can be difficult to attribute blame or, more importantly, identify the solution.
In your SOR you should therefore be very clear about your requirements and how you expect the supplier to mitigate as many of the risks relating to resilience as possible.
Firstly you should set a set of resilience requirements. The supplier should be asked to quote the Mean Time Between Failure rates for all hardware supplied. You should specify the hours and times when the system must be operational.
You then need to define the minimum acceptable availability levels for vital system components (failure means system is unavailable) important system components (scanners) and individual desktops. Failure of vital system components needs to be avoided at all costs as overall system availability rates need to be close to 100% for key office hours. This should be stressed in this section and suppliers required to provide a number of options providing progressively greater resilience at greater expense.
Resilience facilities that should be included in these options should include Uninterrupted Power Supplies for all servers; duplicated network cards; clustered database servers; mirrored content servers; high resilience storage technologies including RAID and other strategies for avoiding single points of failure on the system.
You need to make it clear to the suppliers that high availability is vital and you need to involve ICT staff to assess the options and select the best compromise between high availability and cost.
The preferred supplier should also be required to provide documented backup and archive and disaster recovery plans as part of the implementation specification phase.
Addressing resilience in the SOR can help mitigate many of the risks.
