In two requests for information (RFIs) released in late December, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) wants to hear from vendors on “data center infrastructure managed services” (DCIM services) and “data center patch management services.” LAUSD serves more than 600,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade at over 1,000 schools across more than 720 square miles of Southern California. Among the takeaways:
- On DCIM, LAUSD seeks services that are “inclusive of all services, technologies, strategies and models (on premise, colocation and/or cloud) for storage, network and compute infrastructure to support data and applications.” Information from vendors should include “all necessary hardware, software, personnel and other items” required, according to the RFI. The district’s data center environment includes “2,500 servers” — roughly 1,400 Microsoft Windows servers and 800 Linux servers among them; plus 180 VMware ESX hosts. The hardware platform is HPE for compute and Infinidat and HPE 3PAR for storage.
- Requirements include understanding the existing infrastructure and application landscape and being able to “transform current environment into a managed services solution”; being able to migrate existing hardware and software to a managed services solution; and in lieu of a full migration, leveraging the district’s existing environment and tech stack to ramp up a migration in a “phased approach (i.e., as equipment is decommissioned, new technologies are needed, etc.).” The project’s potential value and term are not specified. Responses to the RFI are due by 5 p.m. Jan. 19 and must indicate customers in education and public sector/government, and completely address all solution requirements.
- LAUSD defines data center patch management services as the process of “identifying, acquiring, testing, and deploying patches or code updates to operating systems, software, and applications across servers and other related equipment,” according to the RFI. Respondents should develop a “detailed patch management process including all necessary hardware and software,” to make sure patches are identified, tested and deployed in a timely fashion, and meet security requirements and practices.
- Respondents should provide a task and activity list that supports LAUSD’s five phases of patch management. These include assessing the district’s production environment, prioritizing threats and vulnerabilities and planning to implement patches; identifying new patch updates, ensuring they’re virus free and creating a “patch criticality”; evaluating and planning around testing and deployment; deploying patches into the production environment while communicating with stakeholders; and undertaking next steps, including documenting system changes, assessing threats and vulnerabilities, validating sources on patch update information and assessing “operational effectiveness.” Here, too, the project’s possible value and term are not specified. Responses to the RFI are due by 5 p.m. Jan. 19 and must describe “expertise, capabilities and efficiencies in providing consolidated services between Data Center Patch Management Services and ... Data Center Infrastructure Managed Services.” Regarding both RFIs, based on submittals, LAUSD may choose a group of respondents for interviews and/or demonstrations of products.
