Commercial Enterprise Data Center

Request for Information National Information Technology Center (NITC) The National Information Technology Center (NITC) is a part of the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). The mission of NITC is to enable Government agencies to achieve their missions by providing innovative, cost effective, and secure information technology solutions. NITC provides information management services and technology to support the missions of the USDA and its agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), General Services Administration(GSA), and other government clients. NITC headquarters is located at 8930Ward Parkway, Kansas City, Missouri, with employees also stationed in St. Louis, Missouri, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Washington D.C. NITC is a centralized computing facility of mainframe and mid-range platforms, software and support. NITC customers access their services from remote locations throughout the continental United States via private and public networks. NITC's computing facility of mainframe and mid range platforms, software and support represents "leading edge" capability, consistency, and reliability. The applications that run in the NITC environment are national in scope and importance, directly serving approximately 70,000 end users. NITC works closely with customers to provide the technical resources, the expertise and the processing environments critical to their applications. NITC is a 24 hour per day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year continuous operation. NITC also operatesEnterprise Data Centers in St. Louis, Missouri and Beltsville, Maryland. For more information on NITC, see www.ocio.usda.gov/nitc/index.html. The Enterprise Data Centers The mission of USDA EDCs under the operational control of the National Information Technology Center (NITC) is to provide reliable and cost-effective Information Technology Solutions to achieve effective mission performance delivery for the USDA, its agencies, and others. The vision of the EDCs is to provide world-class leadership through innovative, reliable Information Technology services and enterprise solutions.USDA intends to promote a collaborative "partnership" between the NITC and the Contractor to accomplish these core objectives and other goals and objectives of this contract. In this partnership, both sides seek to achieve their goals in a mutually beneficial arrangement. This partnership must reflect the attributes of an open, collaborative, customer-oriented, professional relationship in which the government and industry work together to do the following: 1. Meet the national goals for USDA stipulated by the President, the Secretary of Agriculture and Congress 2. Enhance performance and improve quality from a provider, end user, and management standpoint 3. Ensure that products and services deliver tangible and meaningful business benefits 4. Deliver solutions within cost, schedule, and functionality targets that meet program goals 5. Identify and mitigate risks and responsibilities of multiple implementations and initiatives 6. Collaborate with other contractors, federal government departments/agencies, and business partners to ensure program success 7. Resolve the complexities and difficulties that are characteristic of implementing, integrating, maintaining, and securing large-scale solutions 8. Ensure consistent, complete protection of data, and individual privacy rights 9. Ensure that the business relationship between the government and the Contractor is a successful one from the perspective of trust and shared risks. Note: The government does not intend to form a legal partnership by the award of this contract. No legal partnership, either actual or implied, will result from this contract. Rather, the terms "partner" and "partnership" are being used strictly in a non-legal sense, to describe a close working relationship between the Contractor and NITC to achieve a set of objectives consistent with the NITC mission. A traditional contractual relationship will exist with NITC as the customer, and at no time will the Contractor perform inherently government functions. The ability to achieve program benefits depends heavily on successfully supporting NITC Business Owner applications and the underlying information technologies. Program Objectives Secure, robust, and reliable data centers that can adapt to NITC's changing needs are essential to the successful support of the USDA EDC consolidation strategy. Currently, most data center operations that support USDA Business Applications are either stove-piped, contracted for a specific application or business process, or are not under NITC's direct control. This situation produces wide variations among individual data center capabilities and services and presents serious obstacles to USDA's ability to make rapid changes. To help address these business and technology issues, USDA established the EDC initiative and data center consolidation strategy to create the new foundation of the future USDA enterprise. The objectives of the EDC Program are to: - Establish a set of end-to-end strategic data center operations and services that would augment USDA EDC's with commercial offerings - Implement a secure architecture to support Government/Department initiatives - Reduce the USDA security perimeter and enhance the protection of privacy and security of data - Improve USDA's ability to support IT processing workload - Improve service level to end users, business partners, and USDA Mission Area Business Owners To meet its current and future business needs, USDA has established three (3)geographically dispersed, world-class EDCs that are owned by the government and operated by NITC. Each EDC provides the necessary infrastructure for two critical purposes: (1) hosting newer business applications, both Internet and mainframe-based; and (2) hosting legacy business applications. The future EDC operational environment will provide NITC with the flexibility to grow in size and capabilities to meet its future needs. To accomplish this, NITC is seeking an industry partner that can combine best-of-breed operations from the traditional data center model with the updated technology and operational approach of the latest Internet-based, application-hosting model. This contract does not require the acquisition of data center facilities for NITC's exclusive use; however, NITC does require a dedicated infrastructure and dedicated space in existing facilities to ensure the integrity and security of its enterprise operations. NITC requires multiple environments that provide long-term flexibility to help meet its changing regulatory and agency business needs. To meet the NITC goal of providing a consistent and secure user experience, it is imperative that all EDCs possess a common level of interoperability and standardization that is compliant with NITC operations. This level of interoperability and standardization will ensure a unified, high quality, service-oriented operating environment, while also making it possible for NITC to establish standards for development of future business applications. The environments include but are not limited to: - Support for transaction-based business applications and public web sites with low to medium security classifications. Services can include infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and/or storage as a service. NITC will oversee the Contractor to ensure they provide NITC Customer Business Application Owners and organizations with superior service. NITC will coordinate the transition of new applications and the migration of legacy applications to the contractor's facilities. NITC will manage the ongoing relationships of the contractor and the NITC Customer Business Owners. NITC must have consistent visibility into the Contractor's EDC operation to ensure the accurate monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLA) and critical security and operational events. The creation of this fourth EDC operating environment will allow NITC to improve the quality and efficiency of programs and services, and will promote the fiscal soundness of its data center consolidation strategy.