The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking vendors to provide engineering and technical capabilities to help manage the bureau’s critical data centers across five U.S. locations. At the same time, the FBI’s Data Center Hardware and Operating Systems Section (DCHOSS) is developing a Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for IT Professional Engineering Services to support this effort.
The procurement process is still in the research stage, but FBI officials expect to have the contract awarded and active by August 1. The selected vendor will support DCHOSS maintenance and operation of the servers, including storage and networking engineering support, operating system, virtualization, and backup systems engineering and support.
These services support the FBI/DOJ data centers and critical technical sites of information technology operations. The servers will be located at FBI locations in Pocatello, Idaho, Clarksburg, W.V., Huntsville, Ala., Vienna, Va., and Washington, D.C.
The contract will have two main focuses. The first is to ensure the FBI’s unclassified and classified computer systems – consisting of several thousand servers, storage, compute switches, and blade centers that provide hosting services for the enterprise – are maintained in a secure, reliable manner with minimum disruption and production systems 99% uptime. The second is to procure technical refresh of IT systems.
The current FBI technology environment consists of complex systems and advanced configurations which require technical engineering and expertise to operate, and FBI productivity depends on having these systems available on a 24/7/365 basis.
According to the request for information, specific requirements of this contract are to have a full-time on-site presence in all data center locals and primary technology centers to interact daily with the local FBI systems and teams.
In addition to having the ability to maintain a consistent pool of technical expertise, the FBI seeks to demonstrate the ability to manage contractor staff in multiple locations.
