Provision of LAN and Wireless Networks

South Oxfordshire District Council and Vale of White Horse District Council (the councils) are replacing the active network components of their offices and buildings, including all switching, wireless access points and security devices. The councils wish to move to a single cloud-managed platform for all sites and devices enabling management through a single dashboard.

The solution should include installation and configuration of the devices to enable the councils’ network to support the migration to a Zero-Trust-Network (ZTN) using SD-WAN.

All sites support hybrid working with staff being able to work at home and within the office over a corporate LAN.

The councils’ technology strategy is a cloud-first approach, and all main applications are either delivered software-as-a-service (SaaS), are planned to move to SaaS or be hosted in Azure. Productivity applications are provided via Microsoft 365. The councils have no main datacentre or physical centralised server-room. Each site will be connected to the internet via direct connection and will require network protection.

OUTLINE REQUIREMENTS
Solution must be managed through a single cloud enabled platform and provide single dashboard for unified management for switching, wireless and security appliances.
Modern deployment through zero-touch provisioning.
Network and wireless should support latest technology version and allow for future growth.
Network switches must:
• support stacking where more than one switch is being deployed in a comms rack.
• Provide PoE to support wireless access points and QoS to assist with voice and video network traffic.
• Switch ports to support multi-gigabit for wireless access points.
• Switches to support VLAN for network segregation.
Wireless access points must:
• be minimum Wifi-6E (802.11ax)
• support multi-gigabit ports.
• Be powered via PoE wherever possible.
Security Appliances must:
• support SD-wan and ZTN technologies.
• provide local DHCP, NAT, QoS and VLAN management services.
• support site to site VPN into MS Azure for each site.

Suppliers must provide a detailed price breakdown for:
a. Hardware for each site
b. 5 year enterprise licence and support
c. Installation and configuration for each site
d. Ongoing annual support for the duration of 5 year enterprise licence period