Backup Storage with 5-Year Maintenance and Support

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) invites bids for the appointment of a service provider to procure, install, configure and support backup storage infrastructure for a period of five (5) years. The tender is issued through the SITA RFB2003 contract, so bidders must be accredited on that contract, and the service provider must also hold accreditation with the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). The backup storage supports DHA's critical back-end environments, providing data protection against hardware failure, cyberattacks and human error. Equipment is to be deployed at SITA Centurion, the National Central Bureau (NCB) in Pretoria and a disaster recovery site in Gauteng, with delivery and installation required within 6 to 8 weeks of a purchase order.

The technical requirements are demanding. The solution must use active-active architecture with multi-controller redundancy, hardware encryption at rest meeting FIPS 140-2, redundant hot-swappable power supplies and RAID 6 with a hot-swappable spare. Key performance targets include deduplication and compression, ingest performance of up to 72 TB per hour per node, support for NFS and CIFS, integration with Veeam (including a Veeam Ready validated repository) and IBM Spectrum Protect, support for VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix and other hypervisors, and policy-based encrypted replication for disaster recovery. The solution must also provide a landing zone tier for fast backups and a repository tier for deduplicated long-term retention, with archive storage supplied in Year 1 and Year 2. The phased deliverables include 2048 TB of usable backup capacity and 2048 TB of archive capacity in Year 1, additional capacity for NCB digitisation workloads in Year 2, and maintenance and support in Years 3 to 5. Support must be available 24x7 with a 4-hour mission-critical response. The scope also covers rack and stack, onsite configuration, project management and training for four people.

The tender is evaluated in stages: a non-compulsory virtual briefing on 13 November 2026 at 11:00, compliance screening, pre-qualification (OEM accreditation), mandatory technical requirements, and then price and specific goals under the 90/10 preference point system, as the value exceeds R50 million. Pricing must be in South African Rand, include VAT and be firm for the full contract period, and bids must remain valid for 90 days. Bids must be submitted online through the eTenders portal by 27 November 2026 at 11:00. Bidders should note that some figures in the Terms of Reference differ across sections, including the dedup ratio (72:1 versus a minimum of 20:1) and the capacity thresholds, so the full tender document should be reviewed and any questions raised with the contact persons before the clarification deadline. Successful delivery offers a long-term, government-backed engagement covering hardware, software integration, professional services and five years of support.