Procurement of Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and Virtual Application Load Balancer

The Lahore Electric Supply Company (Material Management) invites sealed bids from eligible bidders for the procurement of advanced IT infrastructure in Lahore. This procurement is for the fiscal year 2026-27 and includes the supply of Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) software licensing and Virtual Application Load Balancer software licensing, both critical for enhancing the IT capabilities of the company. Items being procured: - Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) software licensing, quantity 20 - Virtual Application Load Balancer software licensing, quantity 2 The HCI solution must include deployment and migration services by the OEM, onsite training for three participants, and five years of 24/7 software technical support backed by the OEM. The virtualization management platform should provide high availability, redundancy, and compatibility with Intel x86 architecture processors. It must support management of existing VMware virtual machines, real-time monitoring, and AI-based predictive resource scheduling. The virtualization hypervisor must offer VM snapshot, clone, live migration, and automated resource scheduling features. Storage virtualization requires SSD-based read caching, automated data rebuilding, and flexible redundancy strategies. Network virtualization must support NFV functions, network traffic flow visualization, and distributed virtual switch and firewall capabilities. Backup functions should support full and incremental VM backups with automated scheduling and compatibility with common storage protocols. Disaster recovery functions must include VM-level recovery with configurable RPO and compatibility with existing HCI solutions. The Virtual Application Load Balancer must be a virtual appliance supported on the HCI hypervisor, listed in Gartner Magic Quadrant, and provide a minimum of 4 Gbps L4/L7 throughput. It should include inbound/outbound load balancing, DNS proxy, application-aware server load balancing, content-aware switching, health monitoring, surge prevention, SSL acceleration, sticky sessions, and support for database load balancing. The license must cover three years with software upgrades and 24/7 technical support, including onsite configuration and installation. Bidders must be registered with FBR, provide bid security as specified, and comply with all eligibility criteria including non-blacklisting and technical compliance. Bids must be submitted electronically via EPADS v2.0 by the deadline of Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 10:30 AM. Manual submissions will not be accepted. The bid opening will occur on the same day at 11:00 AM via EPADS v2.0. This procurement follows the Least Cost Based Selection (LCBS) method. Bidders are advised to carefully review the detailed bidding documents and ensure all required forms and declarations are submitted. A practical tip for bidders is to register early on EPADS v2.0 and review the tutorial available on YouTube to avoid last-minute submission issues. The contact for queries is the Chief Engineer at Lahore Electric Supply Company, reachable at +92-370-499-0342 or ammm5@lesco.gov.pk.