Brand Name Justification

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to procure brand name enterprise'class IP storage system EMC Celerra NS80. This announcement is considered a brand name justification. This is not a solicitation. This acquisition will be conducted utilizing Part 13 of the FAR, Simplified Acquisition procedures, and the test program authorized in FAR subpart 13.5, and the Patent and Trademark Acquisition Guidelines (PTAG). THIS ACQUISITION WILL BE CONDUCTED UTILIZING EXISTING USPTO'S INDEFINITE DELIVERY/INDEFINITE QUANITY (ID/IQ) CONTRACTS FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS, A SMALL BUSINESS SET-ASIDE. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) currently have an urgent production capacity issue of the Patent Search System, currently used in daily production by over 5000 patent examiners, which there is an immediate need to expand the current installed hardware storage infrastructure. The USPTO uses high performance EMC storage to support this critical application. The USPTO Technical Reference Model (TRM) defines a comprehensive set of information technology standards, services, interfaces, supporting data formats, and protocols. The TRM, populated with standards and standards-based commercial products, will serve as the focus to direct the acquisition, development and maintenance of USPTO's AISs within the bounds of USPTO-designated standard products. The USPTO currently has several deployments of critical production applications running on EMC storage platforms in compliance with the OMB Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office (FEA-PMO). Supporting activities of the FEA-PMO include two components: 1) Development of a core set of standardized Component-Based Architecture models to facilitate technology solutions and the development of a complete architecture (baseline, target, and transition) for each of the 24 Presidential Priority E-Government initiatives, and (2) The assessment and identification - through high-level architectural, critical success factor, and Line of Business performance information - of new opportunities for business process and system consolidation to improve government efficiency and effectiveness. The USPTO has committed to aligning its Enterprise Architecture (EA) efforts with the OMB FEA framework. The equipment described in this justification is consistent with the USPTO approved, standardized and supported, Enterprise storage technical infrastructure. The use of EMC brand name equipment is required for a number of reasons: (1) The use of an EMC NS80 frame for the Patent Search system is in line with our USPTO storage strategy. The NS Series provides the agency with high performance Network storage in an expandable configuration. EMC products provide the high Performance, high I/O activity required by the Patent Text Search system. From a technical requirements perspective, the following items are addressed by using EMC: - No single point of failure that causes loss of performance. - Capability to provide Raid 1+0 (mirrored) disk configuration for maximum reliability and performance. - Provide online upgrades without service interruption. - Capability of up to 28GB of cache that includes cache that can be tuned for maximum performance for write intensive operations, as required to provide the high performance of the Patent Search Systems. - Provide expansion capabilities that allow for the addition of both storage and blades without performance degradation. - Software and firmware levels that is consistent and compatible with the current NAS storage and server environment at the USPTO. Effective use of this NS80 will result in providing a dedicated environment for the Jupiter cluster of services, with regards to the NAS storage. This NS80 provides the ability for BRS Middle Tier to continue using a proven technology to support both the Patent Examiners and outside search customers using existing agency policies and procedures. As this system is integrated with the current Jupiter cluster of services, a common storage framework would be maintained. The introduction of storage products other then EMC in the Patent Text Search environment will introduce undue risk, unacceptable delays on the project. (2) Patent Text Search is a critical component to the Patents business. There is a critical need to scale the system for the planned addition of up to 600-1000 Patent Examiners this year.