NASA HQ Solicitation: Web Enterprise Service Technology Prime

Synopsis – Feb 06, 2012

General Information

Solicitation Number: N/A
Reference Number: NNH12424504L
Posted Date: Feb 06, 2012
FedBizOpps Posted Date: Feb 06, 2012
Recovery and Reinvestment Act Action: No
Original Response Date: Mar 06, 2012
Current Response Date: Mar 06, 2012
Classification Code: D — Information technology services, incl. telecom services
NAICS Code: 541519

Contracting Office Address

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 210, Greenbelt, MD 20771

Description

This notice is issued by NASA Headquarters Procurement Office on behalf of the Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to post a draft Statement of Work (SOW) via the internet and solicit responses from interested parties. Interested parties are invited to submit a statement of capability outlining past work that is related to this requirement.

This procurement is in part a follow-on to NASA’s existing Web services contract with eTouch Systems administered by NASA Headquarters. The work will be performed at locations yet to be determined and may include NASA facilities and offsite locations.

The procurement is one of the five (5) acquisitions under NASA’s IT Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P), which will integrate business processes and information across organizational lines efficiently and securely. Information regarding all of these procurements can be found at: http://i3p.nasa.gov .

Background: Since its establishment, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (also referred to as the Government or the Agency) has continued to evolve as a result of changing missions and priorities. Similarly, NASA’s Information Technology (IT) infrastructure is evolving toward a level of maturity towards a seamless and truly integrated IT architecture. NASA recognizes that effectively and efficiently creating, researching, managing, preserving, protecting, and disseminating the information required to achieve the objectives of research and space exploration, as well as other NASA missions, is vital to mission success.

NASA considers its Web presence and services vital to its continuing success as the world leader in aeronautics, space exploration, and scientific research. NASA’s Web sites and services help fulfill the agency’s statutory requirement to disseminate information about its programs “to the widest extent practicable.” To external audiences, NASA’s Web capabilities provide direct access to agency programs and information, allowing them to participate in the excitement of research and exploration. Internally, NASA personnel use Web sites and services to support NASA’s core business, scientific, research, and computational activities. It is imperative that secure and cost-effective Web services are delivered to meet NASA mission and program needs while achieving efficiency and high levels of customer satisfaction.

WEB Services Goals and Objectives:

The NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) has established the following principles to guide tactical decisions and planning now and in the future:

– MISSION ENABLING: IT at NASA serves to enable NASA’s mission.
– INTEGRATED: NASA will implement IT that enables integration of business (mission) processes and information across organizational boundaries.
– EFFICIENT: NASA will implement IT to achieve efficiencies and ensure that IT is efficiently implemented.
– SECURE: NASA will implement and sustain secure IT solutions.

In direct support of these key principles, the following NASA IT goals and specific web services objectives were established for the NASA Web Strategy:

Goal 1: Transform NASA’s IT infrastructure and application services to better meet evolving stakeholder needs and support mission success

Objectives:

– Work with missions in understanding and meeting their web needs
– Adopt services in close cooperation with customer base
– Deploy solutions that are standards based and interoperable
– Quickly adopt industry proven technologies and practices

Goal 2: Enhance and strengthen IT Security and Cyber security to ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of NASA’s critical data and IT assets.

Objectives:

– Provide a secure, shared web infrastructure and environment
– Provide guidance in coding standards and libraries that minimize security risks
– Perform periodic scans of web assets to assess vulnerabilities
– Collaborate with NASA Security Operation Center to improve security of core web platform
– Provide standardized, coordinated rapid response to Web Security issues.

Goal 3: Identify, test, and adopt new information technology that will make NASA’s missions more capable and affordable.

Objectives:

– Increase cost efficiencies by using shared services
– Prototype innovative technologies
– Leverage open source to drive down cost of software
– Migrate services to cloud, where practical and cost effective
– Partner with private industry to provide services that are innovative and secure

Goal 4: Provide enterprise resources and processes that foster mission success and allow NASA to attract and retain a highly performing IT workforce.

Objectives:

– User friendly and self serviced
– Employ the latest technologies that missions need
– Balance autonomy and governance
– Create and utilize agile contractual vehicles

WEB Environment Current State:

NASA is comprised of 10 Centers plus several satellite facilities that are geographically distributed throughout the United States. Each Center generally is designing or operating one or more missions or programs. Often, each of these endeavors has its own web infrastructure that is used internally within the mission or program for collaboration amongst the NASA workforce and externally with academia and industry partners. Frequently, custom web applications are built to assist in the design or operation of these missions. In addition, missions will often publish information to the public under its own auspices. These sites are extremely diverse, in that they have a wide variety of audiences, uses and technologies. The different requirements for these services have resulted in a Web environment that is highly autonomous but inconsistent in terms of technology, management, security and information search capabilities. In addition, cross-functional services such as enterprise search are unavailable and complex to implement.

In spite of this large, fragmented Web presence, NASAs main point of entry is www.nasa.gov . The current configuration of www.nasa.gov is shown in Figure 1 (Note: All figures posted to this announcement under WESTPRIME RFI Figures ).

Content is made available using a proprietary content management system (CMS). Content follows a standard editorial workflow. In addition to the portal, the current vendor provides other services:

1. Wiki 2. Blog 3. Polling/Voting 4. Chat 5. Video Streaming 6. Social Media 7. Search

www.nasa.gov attracts 600,000 unique visitors per day with an average of 43 million hits per day and an average network traffic of 1.29 TB per day.

The current vendor also provides development and hosting of approximately 140 internal and external web applications and websites, which are developed using various technology stacks. Some of the technologies used are proprietary or heavily customized.

WEB Services Target State:

The target state for web services is to provide a consistent, capable and agile, cloud-based enterprise infrastructure that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) for internal and external web applications and sites using an interoperable, standards-based and secure environment. All web content development and web application development will be done using other support contract vehicles. Vendors will provide the Cloud Broker Role as defined in NIST Special Publication 500-292 “NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture”. http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=909505

To achieve the goals above, the NASA OCIO will offer a diverse set of services (Figure 2). By offering many choices, NASA OCIO will provide an incentive to the NASA community for using this shared service model. The OCIO will also ensure that the selected tools adhere to a set of guiding principles and standards that meet the OCIO application and web services goals. Guiding principles are as follows:

1. We will strive for vendor independence through the use of open source software. 2. We will prefer COTS, GOTS and Open Source solutions over custom built solutions. This includes cloud offerings. 3. Open standards based solutions will be utilized over closed proprietary solutions. 4. All applications will expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 5. At a minimum, data access services should be provided by RESTful technologies. 6. Applications that require authentication will integrate with Agency authentication services.

In terms of the exact nature of the services, the OCIO anticipates providing several choices in each of the service areas. A sample depiction of possible platforms to be offered is shown in Figure 3. Software services should include multiple choices for CMS, Video Streaming, and Collaboration etc.

Figure 4 illustrates how the requirements in the SOW will integrate into the NASA Enterprise Web Environment.

Questions: Interested parties are requested to submit a statement of capability outlining past work that is related to this requirement. The statement of capability shall include: appropriate documentation and references as well as examples of the following:

Note: Page limitation is NTE 30 pages for the 19 questions below. The page limitation does not include graphics and/or illustrations

1. How would the vendor approach developing cost models that promote incremental growth in the use of areas such as bandwidth, storage, and infrastructure?

2. How would the vendor approach teaming arrangements to fulfill the requirements?

3. How would the vendor approach developing pricing calculators for cloud deployment of the services illustrated in Figure 2.

4. How would the vendor approach reporting requirements for utilization statistics, metrics, and deliverables?

5. How would the vendor approach enable NASA Centers and Mission Directorates to focus on content and application development?

6. How would the vendor approach satisfying different Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements? For example some web sites may require an availability of 99.995% while others may require 99.95% or 99.5%.

7. How would the vendor approach backup/restore from the cloud? Include, how would the vendor architect a solution that could restore an environment to full operations, with the lowest mean time to recovery, mean time between failures, medium unplanned outage length.

8. How would the vendor approach architecting the database service for cloud optimization? What innovative technologies could be architected into the PaaS?

9. How would the vendor approach interfacing to Agency services such as imap, authentication or other internal services?

10. How would the vendor approach facilitating the use of different CMS (such as, but not limited to, Alfresco, Drupal and WordPress) to publish to the same portal?

11. How would the vendor approach ensuring cloud interoperability and portability?

12. How would the vendor approach monitoring for compliance (security, accessibility, and other Federal mandates)?

13. How would the vendor approach adequate and industry standard SLAs) within each layer (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) of the cloud?

14. How would the vendor approach compliance with Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements as they become mandatory?

15. How would the vendor approach architecting a solution that required high volume news environment support that supported 750 users with 100 simultaneous users that had a content base of 700,000 documents, updates of 10,000 a month with peaks of 200 updates per hour? The infrastructure should support 15 gbps and web streaming of 500 gbps.

16. How would a vendor approach an enterprise-class, federated search capability that would give users access to millions of documents in widely distributed, differently structured collections that integrate search metadata recommendations, comments and ratings?

17. How would a vendor handle the bandwidth needed to serve NASA’s Web content? The current baseline bandwidth is 900 mbps, which has been growing consistently and will need to grow more rapidly as more content is consolidated into the nasa.gov infrastructure. NASA’s bandwidth usage also spikes during high-visibility events (historically, up to 60 gigabits per second; this is expected to increase with each event).

18. How would the vendor market this environment to the NASA community?

19. How would the vendor approach transition from the existing infrastructure and contract into the new contract and environment?

Feedback to the Draft SOW

The Government is also seeking input on the draft SOW to validate that the SOW will deliver the services illustrated in Figure 2. There is no page limitation on this feedback to the Draft SOW.

The Government will use the information provided as recommended inputs that will lead the Government to develop a comprehensive procurement strategy and to develop a resulting solicitation. Any information used will be on a non-attribution basis. Restrictions that would limit the Government’s ability to use the information for these purposes are of limited value to the Government and are discouraged.

This Request for Information (RFI) is for information and planning purposes and is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government nor will the Government pay for information solicited. Respondents will not receive feedback on the information obtained through this RFI process.

RFI responses must be directed to the point of contact listed below and submitted no later than 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on March 6, 2012. Responses should be submitted via e-mail.

The response format is 8.5″ x 11″, 12 pt, Times New Roman font. NASA is seeking capabilities from large businesses, as well as from small, small disadvantaged, small disadvantaged veteran-owned, and women-owned small businesses for the purposes of determining the appropriate level of competition.

In addition to the aforementioned, responses shall also include a cover page that includes the following (limited to 1 page, formatted as above): name and address of firm, size of business, average annual revenue for past 3 years and number of employees, ownership, whether business is large, small, small disadvantaged, 8(a), HUBZone, small small disadvantaged veteran-owned (SDVOSB), and/or woman-owned; number of years in business; affiliate information: parent company, joint venture partners, potential teaming partners, prime contractor (if potential sub) or subcontractors (if potential prime); and point of contact – position, address and phone number.

Any referenced notes may be viewed at the following URLs linked below.

Point of Contact

Name: Cedric Maurice Mitchener
Title: Contracting Officer
Phone: 301-286-6162
Fax: 301-286-5373
Email: Cedric.M.Mitchener@nasa.gov