SPECIAL NOTICE
D -- Capacity Bandwidth Analysis
- Notice Date
- 6/5/2014
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- NAICS
- 541330
— Engineering Services
- Contracting Office
- Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Acquisition Management Division, 100 Bureau Drive, Building 301, Room B130, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 20899-1410, United States
- ZIP Code
- 20899-1410
- Solicitation Number
- GG000000-14-03637
- Archive Date
- 7/1/2014
- Point of Contact
- Prateema E. Carvajal, Phone: 301-975-4390, Timothy Karol, Phone: 301-975-8249
- E-Mail Address
-
prateema.carvajal@nist.gov, timothy.karol@nist.gov
(prateema.carvajal@nist.gov, timothy.karol@nist.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- This announcement is a Request for Information (RFI) notice. It is not a Request for Proposals (RFP) and does not commit the Government to award a contract now or in the future. No solicitation is available at this time. The Department of Commerce, Office of the Inspector General (OIG), seeks information on commercial vendors that are capable of providing Capacity Bandwidth Analysis. This RFI is being posted by The Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Contracting Office Address The Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Acquisition Management Division, 100 Bureau Drive, Building 301, Room B129, Mail Stop 1640, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899-1640 NIST is seeking responses from all responsible sources, including large, and small businesses. This requirement is assigned a NAICS code of 541330 with a size standard of $14.0M. After results of this market research are obtained and analyzed and specifications are developed for the required service that can meet OIG's minimum requirements, NIST may conduct a competitive procurement. A small business set-aside decision may be made as a result of the information received. All small business organizations (SB, SDB, 8(a), WOSB, HUBZone, and VOSB and SDVOSB) are encouraged to respond to this notice. Draft Requirement: The OIG has a requirement for the following at located at HCHB 1401 Constitution Ave., NW Washington, DC 20230: OIG currently has four offices using paired T1s comprising approximately 3 Mbps bandwidth to each regional office. The regional offices are located in Seattle WA, Denver CO, Atlanta GA, and Silver Spring MD while the Headquarters is located in Washington DC. OIG servers are located at the Washington DC Headquarters location, in which include BlackBerry Exchange Server, Exchange 2010, TeamMate Server, SAS, shared folders are housed. Video teleconference meetings occur frequently, in which video equipment with codecs located at each regional site, transmit and receive video data, in which a bridge function is supported at HCHB. Currently each regional site has a single codec transmitting and receiving video across the 3 Mbps bandwidth per site. The addresses are: Headquarters 14th & Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20230 Denver Regional Office 999 18th Street, Suite 765, Denver, CO 80202 Atlanta Regional Office 401 W. Peachtree Street, N.W. Suite 2742 Atlanta, GA 30308 Seattle Regional Office 915 Second Ave. Suite 3062, Seattle, WA 98174 Silver Spring Office 1315 East-West Highway Suite 4301 Silver Spring, MD 20910 Currently the Seattle location has six employees, Denver location has fifteen employees, Atlanta has eleven employees and the Silver Spring Maryland has seven employees working at the respective offices. The total number of employees is estimated to total to one hundred and seventy two by September 2014; the majority of the employees work at the HCHB location, with approximately four personnel working remotely from a connection using cable television connectivity. All personnel are issued VPN tokens and can work remotely, if teleworking. The four regional OIG sites connect back to a router located at HCHB. If any of the four sites expand beyond three T1s, it will require a replacement of the router at HCHB. There are no technical staff located at the regional locations. Any regional location technical work requires travel to the respective office site. Internet connectivity and bandwidth for OIG and other DOC departments are brought in through another router. Historically routers and switches are preconfigured by another department (who manages the DOC network) and the equipment is shipped out to the site. A technician arrives and physically installs the equipment, while the DOC department remotely connects the equipment, and coordinates with the transmission service (T1) provider. Approximately the last time a regional router was installed occurred in 2007. Current transmission costs are comprised of approximately $3,500 per month for all four locations using the paired T1 transmission links, the GSA Networx contract vehicle is used for providing transmission services to the regional sites. The OIG is considering the use of online webinars to conduct group video conferencing. Each webinar participant would use their computer to participate at the webinar, either at one of the regional sites, at headquarters or remotely while teleworking. This would comprise of each OIG computer user joining a webinar meeting, in which a single all hands large meeting is held, or department managers conducting meetings for each respective group: Front Office, Office of Counsel, Office of Investigations, Office of Audit and Evaluations, and Office of Administration. 1. What experience do you have in capacity planning for video teleconferences (VTC)? What experience do you have in capacity planning for Internet hosted webinars? If so, what webinar and VTC systems are you experienced with? 2. The OIG network (routers and switches) are managed by another agency who controls network access to routers and switches, what access will you need to perform analysis? If you have no network access, what tests would you need to be run to perform analysis for all locations? What types of network access would you need to conduct analysis? 3. Currently different sites use analog phone lines while others use centralized VoIP. What experience do you have with telephone equipment? What experience do you have conducting capacity planning, when migrating from analog lines to voice over IP? 4. What predictive modeling tools have you used for network capacity planning? Does that include VTC, VoIP, and data? 5. What capacity planning have you performed for a headquarters with multiple remote offices, topology? 6. What capacity planning has your company performed and network design for other projects? 7. What tools would you have available to perform capacity analysis and provide recommendations? 8. Are there network tests you would need to perform at each site for the routers located there or would you be able to conduct the analysis at headquarters? What types of network data would you need from the agency that operates the network? What format would the data need to be in, for you to use for analysis? 9. What tests, scanning, monitoring or network examination would you need to be performed by the agency that operates the network? 10. What VPN loading and latency analysis have you performed for other projects? 11. What latency and quality analysis have you performed with computers using 4G air cards? 12. What capacity analysis tools and expertise do you have available for performing analysis and creating a plan to increase capacity using routers. 13. A regional router has been selected, by the department that maintains the network. The router model offers either the capability of using multiple T1s or DS3 what is your experience in capacity planning? 14. What is your experience in creating project plans that would be executed by others? Do you have a sample from a past project, which includes equipment selection, circuit ordering and cut over planning? 15. What is your experience at installing routers and switches? What staffing level is available for swap out and installs of network equipment? 16. What experience do you have a creating a list of reports and alerts for capacity monitoring for routine and surge situations? What monitoring expertise do you have with traffic analysis? 17. What is your experience in analyzing video teleconferencing traffic loading? Do you have models or loading approaches you have used on other projects? 18. What is your experience at creating loads on networks to simulate future traffic? Have you recommended quality of service QoS for these projects? 19. What is your experience at improving network capacity and reducing latency with your designs? 20. What experience do you have designing networks for video teleconferencing? 21. What experience do you have with - video chat, unified communications, integration with Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP)? 22. What experience and projects have you performed capacity analysis and recommended engineering solutions with respect to: 23. QoS quality of services recommendations-, assigning priority to traffic types: voice, video, production services 24. Cloud e-mail capacity loading analysis 25. Internet usage loading analysis 26. Video teleconferencing traffic loading analysis 27. Cloud based applications capacity loading analysis 28. Face to face online conferencing capacity analysis 29. Group webinar online conferencing capacity analysis What is an estimated schedule and number of hours to produce the following: 30. Provide quality of service recommendations that can be implemented by the agency that operates the network. Recommend traffic monitoring report so that when traffic loading increases it is identified and the bandwidth increase can be implemented. Provide the steps to increase the bandwidth, for example add transmission bandwidth at regional offices or add subnet at headquarters etc. 31. The report should also identify the congestion points, predict congestion points with video teleconferencing used by all employees using their computers. Analysis should consider and allow for when employees telework and remotely connect via VPN. 32. Provide a capacity plan in which number of users are translated into bandwidth usage for headquarters and each regional site. For example, regional sites have a set number of T1s providing connectivity to the data in the OIG server room, while headquarters has 100 Mbps LAN connection to the data in the server room. B) Provide peak busy hour traffic analysis, and provide a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to add users and the respective bandwidth that should be ordered. o The spreadsheet and approach should allow new office locations to be added and the transmission calculated. For example a network connection is established at the PTO office in Alexandria with five employees - the spreadsheet should allow bandwidth transmission calculation that allow for usage, as well as projected usage for webinar and VoIP in the future. 33. For each regional location recommend which type transmission to apply fractional DS3 or multiple T1s that will provide the best value with lowest risk of swapping out equipment, not overspending or under sizing a replacement router at the HCHB location, while minimizing the number of outages and minimizing site change out visits that would need to occur. Fractional DS3 represents a cost, but allows incremental growth without changing router hardware while T1 is cheaper but has a hard limit of three cards (6 T1s) within the router, and requires addition of a card with each pair of T1s added. • An inventory of telephony lines and equipment types should be inventoried from parts list and billing records. A step by step plan should be provided to plan for the required bandwidth and loading in the event of implementing VoIP at Seattle, Denver or Atlanta. Approach and phasing: 34. Before conducting a study, are there any recommendations you would make with regards to near term transmission bandwidth increases at the four regional locations? How does your recommendation minimize the risk of not overspending or under sizing a replacement router at the HCHB location, while curtailing the number of outages and site visits that would need to occur? 35. Are there any phased approaches you would recommend to speed up deployment of routers and increase bandwidth transmission, while conducting capacity planning for headquarters and the four locations? For example, HCHB capacity analysis, telephony loading analysis, and regional loading analysis, is there a phased approached that could be used to begin regional expansion of bandwidth? 36. Are there other bandwidth parameters that should be studied or analyzed as a part of this overall effort? What are they? Teleconference: A teleconference will occur on June, 11, 2014 at 10:00 am - 11:00 pm to address questions. All interested vendors must email the NIST point of contact, Prateema Carvajal at prateema.carvajal@nist.gov by June 10, 2014, 10:00 am, ET. The dial in number and access code will be provided by the close of business on June 10, 2014. Requirements for Responding to this RFI: All interested capable IT service contractor shall respond to this RFI by submitting a Capability Statement. The statement should include the following: 1) Company name and address, a contact person's name, telephone number, and email address and, if available, company website URL. 2) Company size classification and socioeconomic status. 3) Response to questions. Project plan for the recommended solution that includes answers to questions in the draft requirement section (above). 4) List of dependencies for government to provide, such as access to routers, switches, or other aspects of the network. It should be clearly explained what can analysis can be performed with access to network equipment, and what analysis can be conducted with limited or no access to network equipment. 5) Any information of similar projects you have performed of this nature and what was accomplished in what time frame. 6) Any work samples, spreadsheet calculators, capacity comparisons that you have conducted and the size of the organization and completion time for the bandwidth utilization information. 7) Network equipment installation capability you have for site visits to install preconfigured routers or preconfigured switches and coordinate with network operators and transmission providers. All responses shall be sent to prateema.carvajal@nist.gov by June 16, 2014 @ 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time with the following subject line "OIG Bandwidth Capacity Analysis". Point of Contact Prateema Carvajal, Contract Specialist, Phone (301) 975-4390, Email Prateema.carvajal@nist.gov
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/DOC/NIST/AcAsD/GG000000-14-03637/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: OIG, 1401 Constitution Ave NW, washington, District of Columbia, 20230, United States
- Zip Code: 20230
- Zip Code: 20230
- Record
- SN03387240-W 20140607/140605235704-7314ac34edfc3bd97ebe929e25d29eee (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
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