Solicitation: 20-FDA-RFI-1232202
This RFI is being used to gather market research to make decisions regarding the development of strategies to obtain technical and business information, in addition to input from the marketplace for project planning purposes regarding the availability of existing or potential solutions for the FDA’s Next Generation Data Center: Modernization, Optimization and Virtualization efforts with the emphasis on achieving:
- Innovative Technological solutions (examples include data center consolidation for cost-efficient cloud and colocation facilities; advances in IT infrastructure to support workload diversity, scalability, and unified management; software-defined networking and modern data architecture to support resiliency and agility; DevSecOps.)
- Substantial systems and process performance improvements
- Demonstrative reduction in unit costs, operating costs and overall cost savings
- Simplification of the environment to one that is easy to operate and agile to maintain, upgrade and scalet o meet changing business needs.
The Government anticipates establishing an ordering vehicle in a future fiscal year to acquire services and support for FDA’s Next Generation Data Center. At this time, an acquisition strategy has not been established for this requirement and the program team is currently in the early planning stages…
The size, scope and complexity of FDA’s current data center footprint has become costly and labor intensive to manage; hence, the FDA is open to exploring new innovations and thinking around data center operations. As the FDA approaches a critical time with regulatory demands, social changes and political requirements, the need for robust IT capabilities are essential. To that end, OIMT is utilizing this RFI as an opportunity to examine the art of the possible for the future of FDA’s next generation data center.
To the extent possible, FDA would like to eliminate all FDA owned or leased data centers within four (4) years. However, FDA believes that multiple factors (e.g. Federal regulations, FDA data management policy) will make it difficult to eliminate all FDA owned or leased data centers. Therefore, FDA believes a hybrid (traditional on-premises, hyperconverged, cloud) IT, multi-cloud (multiple Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS], Platform as a Service [PaaS], and Software as a Service [SaaS] providers) approach is more likely to meet the federated enterprise’s requirements and further the strategy to support early adopters. FDA further recognizes the need to evolve its enterprise security model, policy, and architecture to remove barriers and support our modernization and migration to cloud services…
While the FDA seeks to modernize IT infrastructure, it is also interested in streamlining processes, establishing standards, reducing overall cost and unit cost and effort required to manage the contract, and establishing an environment with enough flexibility and agility to breed innovation. FDA IT customers have requested critical improvement/implementation of best practices and processes:
- Transparency in monitoring and cost data
- Engineering support in troubleshooting, and infrastructure design
- Enhanced support for DevOps methodologies (e.g. DevSecOps)
- Expanding the use of automation, automated workflows, and self-service provisioning
- Continuous Integration, Diagnostics, Testing, Mitigation, and Security
- ITSM
