PIN unveiled for £500m university IT deal

Compute, storage and software kit required by universities across the country

An IT megadeal worth up to £500m has been unveiled in a prior information notice (PIN).

The Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium published the PIN on behalf of it and a number of other university buying groups across the UK: Higher Education Purchasing Consortium for Wales, the London Universities Purchasing Consortium, the North West Universities Purchasing Consortium, the North Eastern Universities Purchasing Consortium and the Advanced Procurement for Universities and Colleges.

The contract - Framework for the provision of compute, servers, storage and related solutions, including converged and HPC - will be worth between £100m and £500m over its lifetime.

According to the PIN, a range of technologies will be procured through the scheme, including compute and storage hardware and software, virtual appliances, support and maintenance, warranty extensions, software-defined storage, backup products, server-related solutions, converged and hyper-converged solutions, high-performance computing and associated infrastructure. Purchases and leases are included on the framework.

The framework is split into four Lots: Lot 1, Compute; Lot 2, Storage; Lot 3, Compute and Storage Solutions; and Lot 4, Compute and Storage Solutions.