By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
Federal News Radio

The General Services Administration is trying again to put together a contract for infrastructure-as-a-service.

GSA released the request for quote (RFQ) on its E-Buy last week asking for bids from vendors on storage, virtual machines and Web hosting.

“The scope of this RFQ focuses on IaaS service offerings available within a public cloud deployment model,” GSA writes in the solicitation. “The implementation is a moderate impact system as defined in National Institute of Science and Technology Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 199.”

GSA first issued an RFQ for IaaS in July 2009, but cancelled in February just as it planned to make awards.

This new RFQ asks for the same services, but the big difference is the moderate security level. The first solicitation asked for IaaS for low security systems.

The RFQ also comes on the heels of the Office of Management and Budget announcing the official launch of its FedRAMP process where applications can get certified and accredited one time and shared among all agencies.

GSA states that all providers must obtain full authorization from FedRAMP before agencies can use the new contract.

Vendors “who receive an award will be given only three opportunities to submit their documentation for assessment,” the RFQ states. “If awardee fails to receive authorization adjudication within 90 days after submission of documentation, the government reserves the right to cancel the BPA…”

One vendor source says among the vendors bidding on this RFQ are Apptis, AT&T, CSC, GTSI, HP, Lockheed Martin and Verizon.

In the new procurement, GSA details requirements in all three areas, and the services must be on-demand, done by the agency without help, be accesses through any network, can be expanded rapidly and can be measured through a dashboard or other similar way.

“The [vendor] shall provide…pricing tiers for storage and data transfer bandwidth (In, Out),” the solicitation states. “The customer shall be billed only for actual service units used per month. Units shall be measured in Gigabytes.”

Under virtual machines, GSA wants vendors to:

• Provide virtualization services for the customer to be able to spawn on-demand virtual server instances.
• Support a secure administration interface for the government designated personnel to remotely administer their virtual instance.
• Provide the capability to dynamically allocate virtual machines based on load, with no service interruption.
• Provide the capability to copy or clone virtual machines for archiving, troubleshooting, and testing.

Responses are due June 15.

Read more about cloud computing in the federal space at the Fed Cloud Blog.

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