market sounding exercise for the supply of information

Market Sounding Exercise Document of 9

Market Sounding Exercise for the Supply of Information Technology Infrastructure for the Chinese Medicine Hospital

Market Sounding Exercise Document

The Food and Health Bureau (“FHB”) is conducting a market sounding exercise (“MSE”) to invite solution providers (“interested parties”) and other prospective companies, who may be interested in bidding for the supply of Information Technology Infrastructure (“ITI”) for the Chinese Medicine Hospital (“CMH” or “the hospital”), to share their level of interest as well as experience and provision. 1 The Market Sounding Exercise

1.1 Through the MSE, the FHB would like to understand potential vendors’: (a) Level of interest in the tendering exercise to be arranged after the MSE; (b) Capability to take up the provision of the ITI for the CMH; (c) Cost estimation; (d) Specification of both hardware and software; and (e) Scope and details of implementation and support & maintenance services.

1.2 This is not a pre-qualification exercise to shortlist or prequalify any potential vendors or part of a tendering process. All information, views, and ideas of the respondent will be kept confidential and will not be used for any future tender evaluation exercise. Access to such information will be restricted to authorised personnel strictly on a need-to-know basis. Potential vendors who do not respond to the MSE will not be barred from the future tendering exercise.

1.3 All service providers having capability and experience in supplying ITI are encouraged to participate in the MSE.

1.4 In responding to the MSE, a respondent shall be deemed to have agreed to all the terms of this invitation. Respondents should note that the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will not be responsible for any costs and expenses that may be incurred by respondents in response to the MSE.

1.5 Submission of any information such as product, functional and technical information is welcome.

1.6 Interested parties are encouraged to respond, as far as practicable, to the market sounding questions listed in Proforma and Questionnaire. Relevant views and suggestions in relation to topics not mentioned in this document are welcome insofar as they are relevant and may enhance the completeness of the exercise.

1.7 Responses to the market sounding questions in Proforma and Questionnaire should be returned to the FHB on or before 29 Nov 2021:


Either by email to: [email protected] (Attention: Mr. Tony FUNG)

Or by post to: Chinese Medicine Hospital Project Office,

Food and Health Bureau,

11/F, THE HUB, 23 Yip Kan Street,

Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong

(Attention: Mr. Tony FUNG) 1.8 The FHB will take stock of the suggestions and comments received through the MSE and

fine-tune the system/ tender design as appropriate. Proposals from interested parties may be considered by the FHB in compilation of tender documents and specifications for the tender.

1.9 Interested parties shall check the CMH webpage under FHB’s website regularly before the due date as set out in paragraph 1.7 above for any update on the MSE and progress of the exercise: https://www.fhb.gov.hk/en/chinese_medicine/information_centre/index.html.

2 Background

2.1 The Chief Executive announced in the 2014 Policy Address that the Government had decided to reserve a site in Tseung Kwan O (“TKO”) for setting up a CMH. The 2017 Policy Address stated the Government decided to finance the construction of the CMH and identify by way of tender a suitable non-profit-making organisation (“NPMO”) to operate the CMH.

2.2 CMH will be owned by the Government and the selected NPMO will operate the CMH. The tendering process to select the contractor for operation of the CMH was launched in September 2019. Upon the completion of tender assessment, the Government awarded the service deed for operation of the CMH in TKO to the Hong Kong Baptist University in June 2021.

2.3 The CMH would be positioned as the flagship Chinese medicine (“CM”) institution leading the development of CM services and Chinese medicines in Hong Kong. It will be a change driver, promoting service development, education and training, innovation and research, and facilitating collaboration with both local and international parties.

2.4 The CMH with provision of 400 beds will provide a comprehensive range of CM services. Service types include pure CM services, services with CM playing the predominant role in collaboration with Western Medicine and Integrated Chinese-Western Medicine services. The scope of service to be provided in the CMH covers inpatient, day-patient, outpatient and community outreach services.

https://www.fhb.gov.hk/en/chinese_medicine/information_centre/index.html


2.5 The construction works of CMH was commenced in mid-2021. It is the target for the CMH to commence services by phases from the second quarter of 2025.

2.6 To support the functions and operation of CMH, contractors will be appointed through tendering exercises to develop and maintain a number of application systems for CMH. The diagram below illustrates the overall picture of major application systems and equipment of CMH:

2.7 More information on the services provision and design of the CMH can be found in the

following link: https://www.fhb.gov.hk/en/press_and_publications/otherinfo/200900_cmhp/index.html.

3 Project Overview

3.1 In order to build up and support the overall Information Technology (“IT”) operations of CMH, it is required to establish a centralised and reliable infrastructure, with balanced availability and scalable solution.

3.2 The ITI of CMH including data centres, network, servers, workstations, email system, security system and mobile technology platform, etc. System management facilities will also be set up to facilitate effective and efficient access to various IT systems by CMH staff to support daily operations of the hospital.

3.3 The infrastructure should enable the CMH to adopt various smart system and mobile applications to help healthcare professionals in CMH, patient and public. The infrastructure should also enable CMH to join Electronic Health Record Sharing System,

https://www.fhb.gov.hk/en/press_and_publications/otherinfo/200900_cmhp/index.html


facilitating sharing of appropriate patient information with other healthcare services providers for continuity of patient care. There could be considerations in establishing certain degree of linkage to other clinical systems outside CMH.

3.4 The infrastructure should provide the IT platform to facilitate CMH applications highlighted in paragraph 2.6 and other IT supporting systems.

3.5 High level of ITI of CMH is illustrated as below:

3.6 Tentative scope of ITI consists of following components: (a) Data Center services, including hosting service, initial setup and ongoing

maintenance; (b) Network infrastructure, including wired and wireless network, data center network,

Demilitarized Zone (“DMZ”), structure cabling, etc.; (c) Server platform, including physical and virtual server platform, storage (Storage

Area Network (“SAN”), Network Attached Storage (“NAS”), etc.) and backup components;

(d) Infrastructure supporting systems and services, such as Network Time Protocol (“NTP”), directory service, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (“DHCP”), Domain Name System (“DNS”), etc.;

(e) System management services, including overall infrastructure monitoring systems, centralised log analytic systems, etc.; and

(f) Security services, including server platform, network, endpoint protection, identity and access management, etc.

4 Sizing estimation, system environments and workload

4.1 The infrastructure as well as the network for the CMH will be located in the primary data centre (“PDC”) and secondary data centre (“SDC”). High level infrastructure topology is


illustrated as below:

4.2 PDC and SDC will serve as the production and non-production environment for all

applications. High availability design without localised single point of failure shall be adopted. PDC will be setup in CMH premises, while SDC will be acquired through hosting service outside of CMH with Data Center Interconnect (“DCI”) over Wide Area Network (“WAN”) link connection.

4.3 The ITI will be divided into several environments to facilitate application and security design, including production environment (primary and remote), and non-production environment (development, pre-production, user acceptance test, load test, training and integration test).

4.4 Workload

(a) ITI should support performance and workload requirement for at least ten years from the date of acceptance of the ITI;

(b) ITI should support the operating hours as 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout the year;

(c) CMH would provide 400 beds and the estimated outpatient attendance is 310,000 per year;

(d) The estimated number of users is 1,500; (e) The planned number of desktop workstation is 1,000 sets; and (f) The planned number of mobile device is 390 sets.

4.5 Please refer to Appendix I for the tentative scope of work and sizing information, the key design and planning directives and concepts of the CMH.


5 Tentative Project Requirements of the ITI 5.1 Subject to any changes made by the Government at any time before the upcoming tender

exercise for the ITI, the project requirements and the contractual obligations of the contractor of a contract awarded for the ITI may include but not limited to the following:

No. Category Key Functions (not exhaustive) 1 Data Centre

and Hosting Service

a) PDC facilities setup in CMH b) SDC hosting service in remote site outside of CMH c) Data Centre management system

2 Network Infrastructure

a) Core Backbone Network and floor network b) Building Network (wired and wireless network) c) Server Farm network of the CMH data centres at PDC and

SDC d) WAN link services e) Network Zoning (Trusted / DMZ) and Medical Network

Interface Zoning (“MNI”) f) Internet connectivity and Virtual Private Network (“VPN”) for

remote connection g) Load Balancer (GTM/ LTM)

3 Server Farm a) Centralised hosting infrastructure at PDC and SDC including the virtualised machine and physical server farm

b) Server farm comprising physical and virtual servers for the setup of the web, application, database server

4 Storage and Backup

a) Centralised storage system at PDC and SDC to support server farms with both attached logical disk storage and network file system requirement

b) Centralised backup and restore system to support with tiered backup storage, backup to disk and tape mode for offsite backup

5 System Management

a) Centralised infrastructure monitoring and event management b) Patching management c) Software distribution d) Asset and configuration management

6 Security a) IT security solution and products to provide data, application, network, server infrastructure and end-point protection.

5.2 Project management

(a) Provide project management services during all the stages of implementation of


the system, which include project monitoring and coordination of the implementation activities of all relevant parties including other contractors, and in-house project teams of the Government; and

(b) It is estimated that the implementation services of the project would last for 30 months, and the contractor is required to provide services which consists of technical design, hardware and software for all categories as shown in the table in paragraph 5.1 above. High level tentative implementation schedule is illustrated as below:

5.3 Rollout and System Nursing (a) Responsible for the rollout approach, overall planning, installation, drill, on-site

support and coordination work with other contractors and parties; and (b) Provide at least two months of system nursing period before the acceptance of the

systems. 5.4 Training

(a) Provide adequate training (technical training and end-users training), training facilities, training materials and on-going maintenance and update on the training materials.

5.5 Hardware Facilities and Maintenance (a) Propose comprehensive hardware and system configurations for the system in

production and non-production environments to meet the system and application software requirements.


5.6 Software Facilities and Maintenance (a) Propose all software required to be comprised in the system for both production

and non-production environments; (b) Maintain each contractor supplied software to ensure they are operating in full and

proper working orders; and (c) Provide maintenance services covering the supply of all new versions, upgrades,

updates, patches (including security patches) and hotfixes. 5.7 Security Risk Assessment and Audit, and Privacy Impact Assessment

(a) Engage, at contractor’s own costs and expenses, an independent third party contractor to perform an IT security risk assessment of the system at the later stage of System Analysis & Design, and an IT security risk assessment and audit exercise of the system before production rollout; and

(b) Appoint, at contractor’s own costs and expenses, an independent third party consultant to be agreed by the Government to conduct Privacy Impact Assessment and Privacy Compliance Audit for the system at different stages.

5.8 Maintenance Support (a) Provide support and maintenance services for the ITI; and (b) The maintenance period is 10 years from the date of acceptance of the ITI and the

first year should be free-of-charge. 5.9 System Change

(a) Provide configuration changes services for the ITI with new hardware from other contractors and support new application system being implemented; and

(b) The system change support should be free-of-charge. 6 Disclaimer

6.1 All information contained in this document, including its appendix attached hereto and information and documents accessible from the website mentioned, is for reference and for the purpose of collecting market information only. All requirements of the ITI stated in this document shall be subject to change and shall be as stated in the tender documents for the upcoming tender exercise of the ITI.

6.2 This MSE is not a pre-qualification exercise to shortlist or prequalify any potential vendors or part of a tendering process. All information, views, and ideas submitted by an interested party (“Respondent”) will be kept confidential and will not be used for tender evaluation purpose in the upcoming tender exercise of the ITI System. Access to such information will be restricted to authorised personnel of the Government strictly on a need-to-know basis. Potential vendors, irrespective of whether they have responded to the MSE, will not be barred from the upcoming tendering exercise for the ITI System.

6.3 This document does not constitute any offer or invitation/solicitation of any offer in connection with the exercise described herein. Neither this document nor any activities in connection therewith shall create any legal obligations or liabilities in any way on the part of the Food and Health Bureau or the Government of Hong Kong Special


Administrative Region. Neither this document nor anything contained herein shall form the basis of any contract or commitment whatsoever. Any purchase will be subject to subsequent tender(s).

6.4 In responding to any questions contained in the questionnaire or expressing any other views and/or suggestions in the MSE, respondent shall be deemed to have agreed to all the terms of this invitation. Respondents should note that the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will not be responsible for any costs and expenses that may be incurred by respondents in response to the MSE.

6.5 The final functional requirements are subject to subsequent tender(s). 7 Enquiry

7.1 If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the following persons : (a) Ms. Amber LAM, Senior Systems Manager (Chinese Medicine Hospital Project

Office) at email address [email protected] or telephone number (+852) 2205 2353; or

(b) Mr. Dick CHAN, System Analyst (Chinese Medicine Hospital Project Office) at email address [email protected] or telephone number (+852) 2104 0311.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Market Sounding Exercise Document – Appendix I Page 1 of 5

Appendix I

Brief Information on Scope of Work of Information Technology Infrastructure for the Chinese Medicine Hospital The document provides a brief overview of the scope of work and sizing estimation information of CMH. 1 Scope and Sizing

1.1 The scope of work covers the design, supply, delivery, installation, commissioning, implementation, 24-hour system support and maintenance. 1.2 The Contractor shall supply the CMH ITI with Contractor Supplied Hardware, Contractor Supplied Software and related services. 1.3 The Contractor shall provide at least 2 months of system nursing period before the acceptance of the System. 1.4 The Contractor shall provide supporting service of application implementation support with other contractors and in-house project teams of

the Government. 1.5 After the acceptance of the System, the Contractor shall provide the System Support and Maintenance Services for the System during the

Maintenance Period including 1-year free Warranty Period. 1.6 The sizing and transaction information in this Appendix shall be treated as reference only. The interested parties shall prepare the sizing

and transaction estimate based on the latest information available. 1.7 The sizing of the planned ITI are summarised in the table below:

No. System Scope of Work Sizing Information 1 Data Centre

and Hosting Service

a) Using Active-Active Data Centre architecture to support CMH IT systems operation.

b) Setup Primary Data Centre (“PDC”) facilities including but not limited to: • Cage system; • Rack; • Dataport panel; • Automatic Transfer Switch (“ATS”); and • Cable patching.

a) Data Centre floor space: PDC Max: 130 Racks, SDC – Up to 50 Racks

b) Setup at least 50 racks in PDC and 20 racks in SDC with pre-lay cabling

c) Plan to implement Spine and Leaf, Software Defined Network (“SDN”) and Data Center Interconnect (“DCI”) in the network design

d) The network connectivity of PDC / SDC,


c) Provide Secondary Data Centre (“SDC”) hosting service. d) The System shall be provided with all hardware and software

including but not limited to: • Equipment for the setup of data entre service; • Software for the management tool(s); and • Software licenses as required.

and Diversified Network Location (“DNL”)/ SDC should provide by two different telecom carriers

e) There would be both production server farm, non-production server farm locate in PDC and SDC

f) Server connection: Mainly 10 Gigabit or 40 Gigabit fibers for Production Primary and resilience connectivity, and 1G UTP for Server Management

g) There will be 9 floors for CMH. In each floors there will be 4 x network closets

h) At least 600 data ports per floor, included MNI network

i) At least 100 access points (WiFi 6) per floor, connecting to 2 x dedicated PoE switches per network closets which also support MNI network

j) At least 100 concurrent remote connection through VPN

2 Network Infrastructure (Campus Network and Wireless Network)

a) Provide network connectivity for CMH user and patient to access hospital applications and internet (wired or wireless).

b) Provide reliable and scalable Wide Area Network (“WAN”) link services between the data centres.

c) A set of management tool(s) for supporting the management and configuration of the equipment of the Network System known as Network and Firewall Management System.

d) Provide Network Time Protocol (“NTP”) service, Internet and extranet Domain Name System (“DNS”) service, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (“DHCP”) service, Active Directory (“AD”) service, syslog and so on.

e) Clinical and non-clinical PC will be separated into 2 different VLAN/VxLAN and clinical PC will be protected by firewall.

f) Two DMZ located at both PDC and SDC and plan to use VLAN/VxLAN and firewalls to separate the CMH network, DMZ and MNI network.

g) Network traffic between PDC & SDC should be encrypted even using lease line.

h) 1st-tier and 2nd-tier firewalls must be included. k) CMH staff and vendor can remote login via 2FA (or MFA). l) The System shall be provided with all hardware and software

including but not limited to: • Network equipment for the setup of LAN, WAN and Wireless

LAN network;


• Server equipment for the management tool(s); • Software for the management tool(s); • Software licenses for the network equipment (if required). • Security equipment including firewalls and network

encryptors; and • For hosting servers that are public facing.

3 Server Farm a) Adoption of virtualisation technology enables Infrastructure-as-a-Service (“IaaS”) concept, to provide private cloud platform and physical server farm to support Microservice architecture and the Container-based architecture.

b) The Server Farm shall be provided with all hardware and software including but not limited to: • Server equipment for central hosting infrastructure; • Server equipment for the management tool(s); • Software licenses for central hosting infrastructure as

required; • Hypervisor software; • Operating systems of physical servers and Virtual Machine

(“VM”); • Software for the management tool(s); • Logging software; and • Orchestration software supporting the management and

operation of virtualized environment including server and storage systems.

a) At least 80 x Production servers and 60 x Testing servers with 4,000 vCPU and 42 TB memory

b) At least 450 VM and physical servers c) At least 200TB (100TB SSD + 100TB

disk) storage volume and capable for file sharing

d) At least 500 OS license for Windows server or and Linux platform

4 Storage and Backup

a) The System shall be provided with all hardware and software including but not limited to: • Storage, backup equipment for central hosting infrastructure; • Tape drives, virtual tape libraries, and backup and restore

software;


• Storage Area Network (“SAN”) storage, SAN switches and routers, Network Attached Storage (“NAS”), storage management software, and encryption appliance for SAN;

• Server equipment for the management tool(s); • Operating systems; • Software for the management tool(s); • Logging software; and • Orchestration software supporting the management and

operation of storage environment including server and storage systems.

5 System Management

a) Provide the functions of asset management, software distribution, system performance and monitoring, event management and configuration management to monitor the ITI application systems, support software release and perform daily IT operations.

b) Centralised monitoring system for monitoring all components in IT infrastructure as a whole.

a) Depend on the proposed solution of Data Centre, Network Infrastructure and Server Farm

6 Security a) Provide the solutions of security management including but not limited to: • Virus Protection for servers and workstation; • Network Access Control System; • Anti-Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDos) solution; • Intrusion Detection System (“IDS”) /Intrusion Prevention

System (“IPS”); • Anti-spam and Anti-Malware system; • Web Content Filtering Gateway; • Web Application Firewall (“WAF”); • Advanced Persistent Threat (“APT”); • Two-factor Authentication Services;

a) Depend on the proposed solution of Data Centre, Network Infrastructure and Server Farm


• Certificate Authority (“CA”) • Public Key Infrastructure (“PKI”); • Virtual Private Network (“VPN”); • Privileged Access Management (“PAM”); • Hardware Security Module (“HSM”); • Key Management System (“KMS”); and • Security Information and Event Management System

(“SIEM”).

market sounding exercise for the supply of information

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