Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) Digital Strategy questions: FOI release

Information requested

Please could you provide the following information?

1. Number of Sites

2. Number of Employees

3. Number of IT Staff

4. Annual IT Budget for current financial year

5. Number of Datacentres and locations, owned or third party

6. What storage vendor(s) and model do you currently use?

a. When was the installation date of above storage vendor(s)?
b. When is your planned (or estimated) storage refresh date? (Month/year)
c. What is your estimated budget for the refresh?
d. What date does your storage support contract end? (Month/year) e. What is the value of your storage support contract?
f. What is the capacity of the storage data in TB?

7. What compute vendor(s) and model do you currently use?

a. Number of servers?
b. Virtualisation platform?
c. When is your planned (or estimated) compute refresh date? (Month/year)
d. When does your compute support contract end? (Month/year)

8. Do you currently utilise VDI?

a. How many desktops do you delivery VDI to?
b. What infrastructure underpins your VDI environment?
c. What broker do you use for VDI

9. Do you utilise public cloud?

a. How much is your annual spend on public cloud facilities?
b. What cloud provider do you use?

Response

1. Number of Sites: 1

2. Number of Employees: 250

3. Number of IT Staff: approx. 45 (including short term contractors)

4. Annual IT Budget for current financial year: Annual IT Support and Maintenance budget of approx. 1 million.

5. Number of Datacentres and locations, owned or third party: 2, Saughton House, Edinburgh and Caird, Lanarkshire (for DR). Main datacentre is in Saughton House, owned by iTECS (Scottish Government). SAAS currently lease 6 racks in Saughton and 2 in Caird

6. What storage vendor(s) and model do you currently use? Open-e Data Storage Software V7, Nimble CS235, Purestorage PureX20, Synology, Netapp

a. When was the installation date of above storage vendor(s)? Purestorage PureX20 November 2019. The rest approx. 3-4 years
b. When is your planned (or estimated) storage refresh date? (Month/year)  Refresh started already, complete by December 2020
c. What is your estimated budget for the refresh? £40k
d. What date does your storage support contract end? (Month/year)  November 2022
e. What is the value of your storage support contract? Approx £22k per annum
f. What is the capacity of the storage data in TB? 40

7. What compute vendor(s) and model do you currently use?

a. Number of servers? 7
b. Virtualisation platform? Solaris LDOM/Zones
c. When is your planned (or estimated) compute refresh date? (Month/year)  June 2025
d. When does your compute support contract end? (Month/year)  Yearly Support

8. Do you currently utilise VDI?

a. How many desktops do you delivery VDI to? SAAS currently use 11 Virtual Production Servers, 14 Virtual Development Servers, 0 Live Virtual Desktops and 54 Virtual Development Desktops
b. What infrastructure underpins your VDI environment? VDI environment is provided by iTECS
c. What broker do you use for VDI? VDI environment is provided by iTECS

9. Do you utilise public cloud? Yes

a. How much is your annual spend on public cloud facilities? Approx. £600 per month
b. What cloud provider do you use? UK Government Platform as a Service (PaaS), Atlassian

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