CMS Virtual Data Center

This source sought notice is posted to provide the small business community an opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities in response to a Virtual Data Center (VDC) need within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This notice is for small businesses only (e.g., 8(a), service disabled veteran owned small business, HUBZone small business, small disadvantaged business, veteran-owned small business and women-owned small business). Large businesses should not respond. Teaming arrangements and joint ventures are encouraged for vendors preparing responses to this notice. The Government will assess each capability response in order to determine that the small business, as the potential prime contractor, can satisfy the FAR Limitation on Subcontracting where at least 50% of the labor dollars are incurred by the prime for each functional area defined in this notice. CMS plans to issue multiple Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contracts to meet the VDC needs. The primary objective of the VDC is to provide the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and services to operate CMS business systems and to safeguard its data. The VDC is considered mission critical. At this time, CMS anticipates a separate small business IDIQ set aside for VDC-related work. The functions of that effort will be defined at a later time. Interested parties may use the chart as a guideline in preparing responses; at a minimum, each respondent must demonstrate the proposed prime contractor's capabilities and experiences for the defined functional areas. In addition, the same level of information shall be provided for each potential subcontractor/teaming partner. FUNCTIONAL AREAS: See attachment entitled VDC IDIQ SS Functional Areas CMS believes that the work performed in each functional area must be provided in a way that ensures a high level of interoperability and integration between CMS business systems and other government agency systems; this will allow for increased availability of critical systems, expansion of disaster recovery capabilities and compliance with CMS and other government security standards. Each respondent must meet the resource requirements provided below in addressing its capabilities as identified in the chart above; again, while teaming is encouraged, the response must show that the small business possesses control of these resources independently in the event of unsuccessful subcontractors/teaming arrangements. This will be critical to the success of the small business prime contractor. RESOURCES: 1)Own/lease and operate data centers to ensure highest prioritization of resources in support of CMS' business applications. Currently the Office of Information Services has contractors that run three data centers. Combined these data centers are currently comprised of the following: a) 10,000 square feet of raised floor space b) 600 UNIX servers running Solaris 10 with 350 virtualized local zones within 100 global zones c) 300 Windows Servers of which approximately 250 Servers are virtualized on an Egenera platform d) Three IBM z10 Mainframes currently processing up to 21,000 MIPS e) WAN Data Communications that operate Primary and Backup DS3 Network Connections at each data center f) A combined Tape Library consisting of over 500,000 cartridges running on various tape drive devices g) A combined storage capacity with over 700 TB running on DASD and SAN devices h) Ability to process 200,000 scheduled and non scheduled batch jobs per month i) Provide Seat Management and Help Desk services and support for 5200 CMS employees within Central, Regional and Satellite offices 2)Substantial resources to expedite large quantity purchases and delivery of materials (e.g, resources to ensure that 100+ desktops can be purchased, imaged and installed in under 30 days as a result of an influx of hundreds of new employees). 3)Possess the resources necessary (at the appropriate knowledge level) to recover from a catastrophic Virtual Data Center (VDC) failure. For instance, the following real world, recent examples of these issues included (but are not limited to): a) The power disruption in the Baltimore Data Center in 2006/2007 - It was necessary for a contractor to work directly with electrical technicians to coordinate the reconfiguration of power feeds with the stopping and starting of numerous critical IT services and continuously communicated system availability to the user community. b) The H1N1 Pandemic of 2009/2010 - A contractor was able to quickly provide all necessary resources and demonstrate the ability to ensure that mission critical data center operations could be maintained in the event of a pandemic. c) The shutdown of the Baltimore Facility during the Blizzard of 2010 - A contractor was able to provide local lodging and transportation to essential data center staff to ensure mission critical operations continued while the CMS facility was closed. d) The corrupt MacAfee Anti-virus data file in 2010 - Within hours of the incident, a contractor was able to provide over 100 additional resources from within the corporation to manually fix over 4,000 laptops and desktops over a 2 day period. Please note that at the time that the Government requests proposals on this effort, the prime contractors must be Capability Maturity Model Infrastructure (CMMI) level 3 certified. CMS will not review or answer questions from vendors at this time. Please send this statement to OAGM_DSC@cms.hhs.gov no later than the response date of this Sources Sought notice. Responses should not exceed 25 pages.