36C10A25Q0089.docx

Sources Sought Notice Sources Sought Notice

GENERAL INFORMATION

SET-ASIDE

Technology Acquisition Center

23 Christopher Way Eatontown NJ 07724

POINT OF CONTACT*

Contract Specialist Juan C Perez juan.perez5@va.gov 512-981-4467

PLACE OF PERFORMANCE

ADDRESS

POSTAL CODE

COUNTRY

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

AGENCY’S URL

URL DESCRIPTION

AGENCY CONTACT’S EMAIL ADDRESS

EMAIL DESCRIPTION

DESCRIPTION

DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION

September 22, 2025

1. INTRODUCTION

This Request for Information (RFI) is issued for conducting market research and planning purposes only. Accordingly, this RFI constitutes neither a Request for Quote (RFQ), Request for Proposal (RFP), nor a guarantee that one will be issued by the Government in the future; furthermore, it does not commit the Government to contract for any services described herein. Additionally, this RFI does not restrict the Government as to the ultimate acquisition approach. In accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 15.201(e), responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is seeking industry information about solutions to replace and modernize our current Oracle SuperCluster M8 estate. The replacement platform must meet or exceed the benchmark and baseline performance and capacity specifications identified in this RFI and deliver improvements in resiliency, operability, scalability, and compliance. This RFI is for market research purposes only. Responses will inform future acquisition planning and strategy. No contract will be awarded based on this RFI.

The Government is not responsible for any cost incurred by industry in furnishing this information. All costs associated with responding to this RFI will be solely at the interested vendor's expense. Not responding to this RFI does not preclude participation in any future solicitation if any is issued. Any information submitted by respondents to this RFI is strictly voluntary. All submissions will become Government property and will not be returned. Interested vendors are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted or competition sensitive information contained in their response. VA is under no obligation to provide feedback to the company, or to contact the company for clarification of any information submitted in response to this RFI.

2. RFI Response Instructions

Provide the following information:

(A) Provide Company Information:

1) Company Name.

2) Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE)/Unique Entity ID (previously Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS)) under which the company is registered in System for Award Management (SAM)/ Small Business (SB) Administration, SB Search.

3) Company Business Size and Status for North American Industry Classification (NAICS) ________.

4) Contract Vehicles: Identify if you can provide services via a Government-wide Acquisition Contract, Federal Supply Schedule, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) VI, etc., that may assist in determining acquisition strategy.

5) Socioeconomic Data: Identify business size. If a small business, please identify socio-economic category(ies).

6) Company Address.

7) Point of Contact Name.

8) Pont of Contact Telephone Number.

9) Point of Contact Email Address.

(B) Brief summary (not to exceed 20 pages), describing your company’s technical approach to meeting the requirements, by responding to the below:

1. Benchmark & Baseline Performance: The proposed solution must provide equal or superior performance and capacity for the Benchmark Summary and Benchmark Performance Tables. Vendors shall provide evidence, benchmarks, and technical documentation to demonstrate compliance.

2. Current-State Summary: VA currently operates Oracle SuperCluster M8s with the following capacities

32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (client) 32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (backup) 32 Quad Data Rate (QDR) (40Gb/s) InfiniBand (internal) 16 x 1Gb/s Ethernet (admin) 32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (client) 32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (backup) 32 QDR (40Gb/s) InfiniBand (internal) 12 x 1Gb/s Ethernet (admin) 32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (client) 32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (backup) 32 QDR (40Gb/s) InfiniBand (internal) 12 x 1Gb/s Ethernet (admin) 32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (client) 32 x 10Gb/s Ethernet (backup) 32 QDR (40Gb/s) InfiniBand (internal)

13 Exadata Storage Servers 1500TB raw Automatic Storage Management (ASM) 500TB usable (ASM) 70TB usable file

10 Exadata Storage Servers 1950TB raw (ASM) 650TB usable (ASM) 70TB usable file

25 Exadata Storage Servers 3750TB raw 1250TB usable 70TB usable file

25 Exadata Storage Servers 3750TB raw 1250TB usable

Storage (File)

ZS7-2 Zettabyte File System (ZFS) Storage Appliance 2 storage heads 6 200GB write flash SSD 4 7.6TB read flash SSD 20 7.6TB SSD disks (90TB usable) 40 18TB disks (288TB usable) ZS7-2 ZFS Storage Appliance 2 storage heads 6 200GB write flash SSD 4 7.6TB read flash SSD 20 7.6TB SSD disks (90TB usable) 40 18TB disks (288TB usable)

Oracle Database versions

· Oracle 19c in use

· Exadata Storage Software 25.1

· Oracle 23ai upgrade is planned

Oracle Database features in use

· Real Application Clusters (RAC)

· Partitioning

· In-Memory

· Active Data Guard

· Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

· Advanced Compression

Applications

· Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)

· Oracle Weblogic

· Informatica

Workload profiles

· Secure multi-tenant

· Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)

· Business Intelligence (BI) analytics

· High concurrency and data throughput

· Isolated tenants, no noisy neighbor effects

· 20% annual data growth

· Cyclical and predictable maintenance windows defined

· Integrated and tested bundled updates for all operating systems, Oracle Database, storage, networks and infrastructure components

· Integration dependencies: backup systems, monitoring, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), configuration management

Migration considerations:

· Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC)/Solaris dependencies and required tools for data migration, such as

· Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN)

· Database export/import (Data Pump)

· GoldenGate

· Oracle stores SPARC data in big-endian format for compatibility with other Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC)-based systems. A conversion to little-endian may be required when migrating to a new platform

· Oracle 23ai will require a migration to container databases (CDB)

· Migration to 23ai is not a specific requirement for the initial deployment

3. Desired Outcomes

· Reduced failover and brownout times

· Simplified operations and management

· Lower 5-year total cost of ownership (TCO)

· Higher compute and storage density per data center rack

· 2.5x increase in single threaded Central Processing Unit (CPU) performance

· 5x increase in database Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) (8k)

· 20x increase in flash data throughput

· 2x increase in backup throughput

· Leverage higher speed networks to reduce the number of switch ports and cables, simplifying network management

· Columnar compression to reduce the data footprint of large data warehouses

· Elastic scalability

· Small entry level configurations

· Simple growth in storage and compute with minimal disruptions

· Modernization path to improve compatibility with cloud solutions

· Ability to introduce new database features when they are first available

· Built-in security and compliance features

· Minimize tenant downtime during migration to the new platform

4. Requirements

4.1 Functional Requirements

· High performance platform for running Oracle databases

· Support for Oracle Database Long Term Releases (LTR) 19c and 23ai

· Support future Oracle Database innovation releases

· Support for the following Oracle Database features

· RAC

· Active Data Guard

· TDE

· Advanced Compression

· Must be able to support databases as large as 1Petabyte (PB)

· Must be able to support RAC database clusters as large as 120 cores and 4TB of memory

· High performance platform to support mission critical applications

· High throughput, low latency network between hosted applications and databases

· The ability to limit the number of Oracle core licenses required for a specific feature, tenant, environment or server

· Describe any capacity on demand features in your solution

· Provide secure multi-tenant deployment at the virtual server, physical server and database levels

· Integration with the following monitoring, management and automation tools

· Ansible

· BigFix

· Centrify

· Commvault

· CyberArk

· Dynatrace

· Elastic

· Oracle Enterprise Manager

· Puppet

· ScienceLogic

· ServiceNow

· SolarWinds

· Splunk

4.2 Operational Requirements

· Zero downtime rolling patching for servers, storage and infrastructure components

· Power supplies must be redundant and hot swapable

· Storage devices must be redundant and hot swapable

· Automated self-healing

· File storage must support continuous and scheduled periodic replication

· Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) approved encryption enabled by default

· Integrated provisioning tools for creating and deploying RAC clusters

· Installation and configuration of guest operating system

· Configuration of dedicated bare metal operating system

· Configure network and database storage (ASM)

· Install and configure Oracle grid infrastructure

· Install and configure Oracle database

· Ability to create automated service requests

· Live database server patching for remediating critical kernel vulnerabilities without requiring a reboot

· Describe any management or automation Application Programming Interface (API)s for your solution

· Describe any Oracle Enterprise Manager plug-ins for your solution

4.3 Technical Requirements

· System availability of 99.99%

· Backup rate of 40TB/hr

· Database storage must be configured for Oracle High Redundancy (3 way mirror) with automatic data rebalancing after maintenance

· Describe your testing procedures for Oracle releases and updates, particularly for large databases.

· Dedicated high speed redundant private internal network for each environment to be used for

· Database storage access to reduce contention with other network activities

· Database cluster interconnect to reduce latency, reduce time to detect cluster node failures, improve cluster data coherence throughput

· Each environment should have a dedicated management network

· Each physical server should have the following external network interfaces

· Dedicated Ethernet for remote administrative access

· Dedicated Ethernet for access to service processors and system consoles

· Redundant 10/25/100 Gb/s Ethernet for client access

· Ability to add an additional pair of redundant 100Gb/s Ethernet interfaces client access

· Redundant 10/25/100 Gb/s Ethernet for backup

· Ability to add an additional pair of redundant 100Gb/s Ethernet interfaces backup

· Support for Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) with the ability to use Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addressing

· Support for Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs)

· Describe how to grow your initial configuration to meet the 5 year growth projection in this document

· Describe how you could grow your configuration beyond the 5 year projection

5. Security & Compliance

· VA 6500 alignment

· NIST SP 800-53 (High)

· FIPS 140-3 validated crypto

· Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High (if hosted/managed)

· Section 508 compliance

· National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) §889, FAR 52.204-24/25/23 Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) requirements

· Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) hardening and current Authorization to Operate (ATO) posture

· Describe any documentation or tools you provide for analysis and remediation of STIGs

· Describe any Out of the Box (OOTB) STIG hardening in your solution

6. High Availability & Disaster Recovery

· Sub-second node failure detection and recovery initiation

· Detection of disk stalls and automatic redirection of Input/Output (I/O) to healthy devices

· Rolling maintenance with minimal service impact

· Storage protection and automated rebuild/rebalance

· Split-brain prevention

· Cross-site disaster recovery (DR)

· 2 hour Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

· 12 hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

· Chaos/failure-injection testing results

7. Migration Approach

· Zero or near-zero downtime strategies

· Data transfer and cutover plan

· Rollback capabilities

· Pilot and validation options

8. Support Model

· 24-hour x 7 days per week support (24/7)

· Describe your spare parts logistics and maintenance capability

· Describe your firmware and software patch cadence

· Describe your support escalation paths

· Onsite and remote support options

· Training and knowledge transfer

· No access to systems permitted outside of the United States

9. Capacity & Scalability

· Scale-up and scale-out architecture

· Minimum and maximum number of cores and memory capacity per physical server

· Minimum and maximum physical servers per rack

· Minimum and maximum storage capacity per rack

· Maximum racks supported per environment

· Inter-rack fabric and elastic growth

10. Commercials & TCO

· Five-year fixed/variable costs (hardware, software, support, facilities)

· Purchase, lease and subscription options

· Licensing impact analysis for Oracle database and features

· Price protection clauses

11. Vendor Response Format Responses must include:

· Hardware bill of materials

· Required software and licensing

· Network topology diagrams

· Storage tier breakdown

· Firmware/OS versions

· Benchmark results

· Failure testing results

· Security compliance matrix

· Exceptions list

12. Evaluation Criteria (Weighting)

· Performance vs. Exadata benchmarks: 35%

· Reliability/ High Availability (HA) results: 20%

· Security/compliance: 15%

· Migration approach: 10%

· Manageability/operations: 10%

· Scalability: 5%

· TCO: 5%

13. Submission Instructions

Responses must be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word or Portable Document Format (PDF).

Proprietary information must be clearly marked.

Responses to this RFI shall be submitted electronically by November 6, 2025, at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time via email to Juan C Perez at juan.perez5@va.gov. All proprietary/company confidential material shall be clearly marked on every page that contains such.

Benchmark and Capacity Summary Table:

Application Servers

Sources Sought Notice