APPENDIX B - BORDER FIREWALL BID SPECS.xlsx

This is a bid specification document for a Border Firewall procurement issued by the University of Southern Mississippi. The specification details comprehensive hardware and software requirements for two identical enterprise-class firewall appliances capable of supporting High Availability deployment. The system must deliver stateful firewall throughput of 80 Gbps, threat prevention throughput of 80 Gbps, IPS throughput of 80 Gbps, and IPsec VPN throughput of 80 Gbps, with support for 30 million concurrent sessions and 600,000 new sessions per second. Required interfaces include eight or more 1/10/25Gb SFP28 ports, two or more 1/10Gb SFP+/SFP28 ports, and four or more 40Gb QSFP+ ports. The procurement encompasses a complete security services suite including advanced malware protection, IPS, URL filtering, DNS security, and cloud-native threat intelligence, along with both site-to-site and remote-access VPN capabilities with IKEv2 and AES-256 encryption. The bid specifications require all required hardware, licensing, subscriptions, support entitlements, transceivers, and related components to be delivered no later than September 1, 2026. Sealed bids are due at the Office of the Director of Procurement Services by Thursday, August 6, 2026, at 2:00 p.m.

The specification mandates five-year subscriptions and licensing for threat prevention, malware protection, URL filtering, application identification, and security updates, with 24x7 support and next-business-day hardware replacement included. The firewall system must support integration with Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, RADIUS, TACACS+, and SAML authentication, along with log transfer capabilities to Microsoft Sentinel. Bidders must provide manufacturer-published performance documentation and detailed descriptions of SSL decryption, QUIC inspection capabilities, and management architecture. The specification requires vendors to identify management and logging component pricing separately if applicable and to provide VM deployment requirements documentation where applicable. The procurement also specifies that the solution must maintain throughput performance with all security services enabled and support industry-standard routing protocols in enterprise network environments.