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FBO DAILY - FEDBIZOPPS ISSUE OF FEBRUARY 22, 2018 FBO #5935
DOCUMENT

D -- Ansible Tower Licenses - Attachment

Notice Date

2/20/2018
 

Notice Type

Attachment
 

NAICS

541519 — Other Computer Related Services
 

Contracting Office

Department of Veterans Affairs;Technology Acquisition Center;23 Christopher Way;Eatontown NJ 07724
 

ZIP Code

07724
 

Solicitation Number

36C10B18Q2696
 

Archive Date

4/21/2018
 

Point of Contact

Joseph.Pignataro@va.gov
 

E-Mail Address

joseph.pignataro@va.gov
(joseph.pignataro@va.gov)
 

Small Business Set-Aside

N/A
 

Award Number

NNG15SD22B 36C10B18F2622
 

Award Date

2/20/2018
 

Awardee

FOUR POINTS TECHNOLOGY, L.L.C.;14900 CONFERENCE CENTER DR STE 100;CHANTILLY;VA;20151
 

Award Amount

$23,552.70
 

Description

Ansible Tower Licenses Control Number TAC-18-48708 2 Control Number TAC-18-48708 JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY 1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement, Acquisition and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, New Jersey 07724 2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a firm-fixed-price delivery order issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC), for the procurement of Ansible Tower Premium subscription licenses (Ansible Tower) with associated maintenance support to establish an Ansible platform within the VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC). 3. Description of Supplies or Services: VA Office of Information and Technology (OI&T) Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO) has a requirement for the purchase of two Ansible Tower premium subscription licenses. Each premium subscription license will permit the control of a 100 nodes/objects within the VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC). The VA is migrating hundreds of VA applications to the VAEC in a phased approach over the next 5 years. In support of VA s transition to an enterprise cloud, VA requires Ansible Tower software to maintain an operational capability of configuration management, provisioning and automation. Ansible Tower is an agentless information technology (IT) automation solution for configuring systems, deploying software, ad hoc task execution and zero downtime rolling updates. The software deploys temporary modules to control nodes/objects over Secure Shell that communicate with the controlling machine through a JavaScript Object Notation. VA initially requires 2 subscriptions licenses with installation in order to control up to 200 nodes which will be required to support the initial set of applications being migrated to VAEC within the next 12 months. Each subscription includes 24x7 support, maintenance and access to software updates/upgrades for 12 months. Four 12-month option periods will be included to renew the license subscriptions and maintenance support. An optional task will also be included to procure additional licenses throughout the 5 year period of performance (PoP) up to a total ceiling of 48 subscription licenses. Along with an optional task for additional software, this proposed action will include the ability to renew any of the optional software procured within the PoP of the overall contract. The option periods and optional task for additional licenses are required to ensure VA can effectively support its transition to the cloud over the next 5 years which is anticipated to involve the migration of several hundred applications. The pace of migration is dependent on application complexity, funding, and numerous other factors that make it impossible to determine in advance the exact number of applications that will be migrated within the next five years, which applications they would be, and therefore, the specific number of nodes that will require control via Ansible Tower during the total PoP. In addition, VA requires a 5 year contract because VA anticipates utilizing the Ansible Tower software to manage and control various objects/nodes and applications in the VAEC for a minimum of 5 years. The total estimated price of the proposed action inclusive of the option periods is 4. Statutory Authority: The statutory authority permitting this exception to fair opportunity is Section 41 U.S.C. 4106(c)(2) as implemented by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Subpart 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B) entitled, Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized. 5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: Based on extensive market research, as described in paragraph 8 of this document, it was determined that limited competition is viable among authorized resellers for the brand name Ansible Tower licenses. To maintain an operational capability of configuration management, provisioning and automation as part of the General Support Services in the VAEC, a tool that supports immutable server architecture deployments is required. VA has an immediate requirement to migrate a multitude of applications into the VAEC in support of its cloud first policy. Vets.gov and Caseflow are two critical applications that need to be migrated to the VAEC environment within Amazon Web Services GovCloud to take advantage of the VAEC infrastructure which provides a highly available and low latency connection. Vets.gov is a public facing website for Veterans to apply for benefits such as healthcare, disability and education. Caseflow is an intranet facing application for the Board of Veterans Appeals to track and process all Veterans Appeals. Since November of 2015, these applications have been supported by over 90 developers which worked to develop a streamlined development operations (DevOps) toolset and continuous deployment pipeline utilizing Ansible playbooks. This resulted in the development of over 20,000 lines of Ansible Tower script code within these applications that is critical to deploying new capabilities as part of production operations. The total labor cost associated with developing the Ansible script code supporting these applications has exceeded over $7M since 2015. In order to migrate these applications to the VAEC production environment and ensure 100% availability and uptime, servers running Ansible Tower are required. Ansible Tower is the only management software that is fully interoperable and compatible with the existing proprietary Ansible script code supporting DevOps and the deployment pipeline for these applications. Implementing any other brand management software in the VAEC would require a complete rebuild of the existing deployment pipeline for Vets.gov and Caseflow, resulting in all 20,000+ lines of code having to be rewritten from scratch, retested, and redeployed. The duplicated cost and effort associated with such a rebuild effort would exceed $7M and take up to 12 months to complete. Further, completely rewriting these proven and reliable production scripts will cause production outages, security vulnerabilities and deployment failures which would result in lost or degraded service to Veterans and possible loss of data which is not acceptable to VA. Also the Ansible Tower software is the only software that can meet all of VA s requirements. Specifically, the Ansible Tower is the only platform/tool that does orchestration, deployment and configuration management in an agentless manner (i.e. that does not require the installation of a software agent on the entity to be managed). This capability is a critical VA functional requirement and enables Ansible Tower to manage all entities within the VAEC including virtual machines, storage, and other networking entities such as virtual routers. Management of these entities is essential for VA to effectively support and maintain its VAEC, and ensure mission critical high availability service level agreements are met. In addition, no other source can provide maintenance support and updates to the Ansible software without access to Ansible s proprietary source code. Access to this code is required to ensure all the services provided are properly configured. 6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in the market research section of this justification. This effort did not yield any additional sources that can meet the Government s requirements. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D), the resultant delivery order will be synopsized and the justification will be made publicly available on the Federal Business Opportunities Page within 14 days of award of the order. In addition prior to exercising the option periods, VA will perform market research to ensure market conditions have not changed. 7. Actions to Increase Competition: In order to remove or overcome barriers to competition in future acquisitions for this requirement, the Government will continue to perform market research to determine if there are any new products or maintenance services available that will fulfill the Government s need. 8. Market Research: Market research was conducted by VA technical experts from August through November of 2017 which included extensive internet research of other brand enterprise management software platforms in the market. VA specifically looked at Puppet and Chef as the only other known enterprise class platforms. The market research confirmed that neither Chef or Puppet are interoperable or compatible with the existing 20,000+ lines of proprietary Ansible script code currently in production and supporting Vets.gov and Caseflow DevOps and deployment pipeline. Therefore, implementing any other brand management platform other than Ansible Tower will require a complete re-build effort on these application that would exceed $7 million dollars and take up to 12 months to complete. In addition neither Chef or Puppet can currently provide the agentless capability as outlined in Section 5 of this Justification. Finally, in November 2017, the Contract Specialist conducted market research to ascertain the extent of limited competition among resellers. Through the use of the Provider Look-up tool on the NASA SEWP V GWAC website, two Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Businesses (SDVOSBs) were identified as resellers of the required Ansible Tower Licenses. Therefore, limited competition is anticipated. 9. Other Facts: None. 10. Technical and Requirements Certification: I certify that the supporting data under my cognizance, which are included in this justification, are accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief. Date: ________________________________ Program Manager Signature: ____________________________ 11. Fair and Reasonable Cost Determination: I hereby determine that the anticipated price to the Government for this contract action will be fair and reasonable based on anticipated competition. Additionally, NASA SEWP V has already determined the prices on contract to be fair and reasonable. Finally, the successful quote will be compared with the Independent Government Cost Estimate. Date: ________________________________ Procuring Contracting Officer Signature: ____________________________ 12. Procuring Contracting Officer Certification: I certify that this justification is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief. Date: ________________________________ Procuring Contracting Officer Signature: ____________________________ Approval In my role as procuring activity Advocate for Competition, based on the foregoing justification, I hereby approve the acquisition of Ansible Tower licenses with maintenance support, on a limited competition basis pursuant to the statutory authority cited in paragraph 4 above, subject to availability of funds, and provided that the property and services herein described have otherwise been authorized for acquisition. Date: ____________ Signature: _________________________________ Advocate for Competition Technology Acquisition Center Office of Procurement, Acquisition and Logistics JUSTIFICATION Justification For An Exception To Fair Opportunity Coordination Matrix Date Concur/Non-Concur Director, Procurement Services E Technology Acquisition Center Office of Procurement, Acquisition and Logistics Department of Veterans Affairs
 

Web Link

FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/notices/d3406b45c57fbe19e4938da32bd7997e)
 

Document(s)

Attachment
 

File Name: NNG15SD22B 36C10B18F2622 NNG15SD22B 36C10B18F2622_1.docx (https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=4094691&FileName=NNG15SD22B-104.docx)

Link: https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=4094691&FileName=NNG15SD22B-104.docx

 

Note: If links are broken, refer to Point of Contact above or contact the FBO Help Desk at 877-472-3779.
 

Record

SN04828802-W 20180222/180220231823-d3406b45c57fbe19e4938da32bd7997e (fbodaily.com)
 

Source

FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)

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