Brand Name Justification COHESITY FINAL for SAM_Redacted.pdf

U.S. Department of Justice Justice Management Division Procurement Services Staff Washington, D.C. 20530

PSS Control No: 25JA-PSS0018

Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity (Brand Name Justification)

1. Identification of the agency and the contracting activity.

The requiring organization is the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), Justice Management Division (JMD), Service Delivery Staff (SDS). The contracting activity is the JMD Procurement Services Staff (PSS).

2. Nature and/or description of the action being approved.

This is a Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity for Brand Name to establish a Delivery Order with Options (DOWO) under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for the renewal of annual standard support for the brand-name Cohesity backup storage hardware and software and related maintenance services for the Department. The requirement will be competed amongst SEWP contract-holders who are authorized to sell Cohesity products and associated maintenance support services.

3. Description of the supplies or services required, including the estimated value.

The proposed action is for the renewal of Cohesity backup and storage hardware and software and related services. The requirement is intended for SDS’s backup and storage needs. Primarily, the storage appliances are needed to meet SDS’s mission to provide disaster recovery capabilities for their core data environment.

Cohesity is a hyperconverged hardware and software-based solution that utilizes a single platform to manage backup, recovery and secondary data storage. Cohesity acts as the long-term backup solution for physical servers, virtual servers and is SDS’s primary solution for taking application-consistent backups of Oracle and SQL databases. Cohesity supports deployment as a physical appliance on-prem or as a virtual appliance in the cloud. This backup solution is the second layer of data retention and recovery for the SDS infrastructure (both on-prem and in the cloud) supporting a longer retention policy of up to a year to meet customer defined requirements and support disaster recovery for the environment. Moreover, Cohesity consolidates and simplifies data management and includes analytics capabilities. Cohesity solves the problem of mass data fragmentation, as data proliferates across multiple systems or cloud providers. Specifically, the requirement consists of the items listed in the table below:

Brand Name Justification Page 2 Subject: FY26 Cohesity Renewals

Figure 1 Cohesity Items List rojected od of performance The current contract is due to expire on September 30, 2025.

4. Identification of the exception to fair opportunity and the supporting rationale, including a demonstration that the proposed contractor’s unique qualifications or the nature of the acquisition requires use of the exception cited.

This acquisition is conducted under the authority of 41 U.S.C § 3304 as implemented by Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.505(a)(4)(i).

Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above

DOJ requires a storage appliance to meet its storage needs, which can only be supplied by one manufacturer, Cohesity.

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DOJ requires the Cohesity backup, storage hardware, software and related services for its existing backup solution and disaster recovery posture. Cohesity is needed to backup and store data from virtual and physical servers in both on-Prem data centers and on the Azure cloud service provider.

The Cohesity solution was implemented in 2019 and currently stores over 2 Terabytes (TB) of data. Any loss of access or service outage would create a catastrophic issue with the smooth storage and access of data, disaster recovery issues, and create discovery problems for any Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and data requests. Further costs would be incurred if a different platform were to be implemented as a result of integrating a different platform into the current DOJ infrastructure, data migration, changes to operational processes, and employee training.

The Cohesity appliances cluster provides compatibility and consistency as well as meets SDS’s disaster recovery needs and maintain a homogenous environment. This renewal will provide SDS’s limited support staff the ability to provide better IT support by focusing on a single manufacturer, better coordinate hardware warranty support. These appliances will continue to improve the Information Technology (IT) security posture of the production environment and meet the IT security requirements required by the National Institute of Standards (NIST), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and DOJ standards.

In 2019, SDS Windows Platform and Services (SWPS) required a backup technology suitable for a Microsoft Windows Server environment. The solution had to be capable of performing backup on both physical and virtual systems, be deployable across SDS data center environments including Core Enterprise Facilities and vendor provided cloud services and provide backup to a multitude of customer hosted middleware such as Microsoft SQL Server. To that end,

• SWPS reviewed architecture and performance requirements identifying a list of 18 requirements (i.e. Web-Scale, Software-defined Infrastructure On-Prem & Azure GovCloud, Distributed NFS/SMB/S3 Support, Global deduplication & compression, Unlimited snapshots and clones, FedRAMP cloud integration etc.)

• SWPS identified three vendor solutions that provided backup/restore capabilities for Windows resources. The three (3) vendors were as follows:

o Cohesity o Commvault Simpana o Veritas NetBackup

• SWPS conducted an analysis of the requirements across the selected requirements. Post comparison, SWPS identified Cohestiy as the solution best suited to meet the identified system requirements. Therefore, SWPS recommended the purchase and implementation of the Cohesity brand name appliance.

Cohesity is the most complete, start small and scale up from 10TB to 110TB and beyond.

Commvault Simpana was a distant second place and last was Veritas. SWPS reviewed

Brand Name Justification Page 4 and validated that Cohesity was able to do what SDS needed, and it passed all tests of functionality needed for Cloud-to-Cloud backup and it integrated well with the existing backup solution SDS had at the time. SDS requires this brand name because Cohesity consolidates and simplifies data management and includes analytics capabilities.

Cohesity solves the problem of mass data fragmentation, as data proliferates across multiple systems or cloud providers. The use of another brand products, even if theoretically possible, would require an extensive, costly, and time-consuming effort to attempt to achieve compatibility with the existing equipment, which would not in the end be guaranteed. Attempting to use other products from other vendors, therefore, would create a significant performance risk and require additional time and expense, without any real benefit to the government.

Additional market research was conducted in September 2024. The market research concluded that the Cohesity brand name continues to be the alternative that could satisfy SDS’s requirements. Market research revealed that there are numerous NASA SEWP V GWAC holders that are authorized resellers of the required brand name Cohesity software and support under North American Industry Classification System code: 541519

– Information Technology Value Added Resellers (ITVARs) with a Size Standard of 150 employees. In addition, there are sufficient small businesses resellers for this procurement to be a total small business set-aside pursuant to FAR 19.5. In accordance with FAR 16.505(a)(4)(iii)(A), the justification will be posted with the request for solicitation on the NASA SEWP V GWAC. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 16.505(b)(2), this action will be synopsized at award on the Contract Opportunities in SAM.gov and the justification will be made publicly available.

5. A determination by the contracting officer that the anticipated cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable.

The requirement will be competed among SEWP V contract-holders who are authorized to sell the Cohesity appliance and support services. Delivery orders placed under the SEWP contract must comply with FAR 16.505 - Ordering, to provide all qualified contract holders fair opportunity to submit a quote. As a result, the competition will ensure the Government receives the most favorable pricing. Although SEWP prices are considered fair and reasonable at the contract level in accordance with FAR 15.4 - Contract Pricing, additional discounts will be sought for this acquisition.

6. Other facts supporting the justification.

This procurement will allow the Windows Infrastructure and Operations team to renew the maintenance and support contract for Cohesity. Cohesity is the backup solution for Windows IOS. The availability of the Cohesity is critical to the operation of the SDS. An alternate manufacturer would not have the internal technical knowledge of the Cohesity product to provide technical support in cases where software and hardware errors create a system outage.

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In addition to the current investment in these specific hardware products, OCIO SDS will also benefit by utilizing the knowledge and skills of the resources that are responsible for supporting the current equipment, considered another significant investment in resources.

The use of different vendor products will affect the Government by requiring additional resources with specific skill sets and knowledge resulting in a further increase to the Department’s operational costs.

7. A statement of the actions, if any, the agency may take to remove or overcome any barriers that led to the exception to fair opportunity before any subsequent acquisition for the supplies or services is made.

Although the Government is limiting competition because of specifying a brand name item, there are authorized resellers of the requested software licenses and maintenance on the NASA SEWP V GWAC. To remove or overcome barriers to competition in future acquisitions for this requirement, the agency will work with the program office to perform additional market research so that other solutions can be considered.

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8. Certifications, Concurrences and Approval.

Technical/Requirements Personnel Certification:

I certify that the information contained in this document for which I am responsible is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Contracting Officer Certification:

I certify that this justification is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Concurrence:

Subsection 2806.304 of the Justice Acquisition Regulation requires concurrence by the Bureau Procurement Chief.

Approval:

Subsection 16.505 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation requires approval by the Competition Advocate for the activity placing the order.