Brand Name Justification - SEWP - COHESITY_Renewals _Redacted 09 16 2024_Redacted Rev1_Redacted.pdf

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

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 under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) to renew the Cohesity backup and storage hardware and software and related maintenance services for the Department. The requirement will be competed among 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

FY25 Cohesity Renewals o

The anticipated period of performance is a 12-month base period.

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.

DOJ requires the Cohesity backup and storage hardware and software and related services for its backup solution and disaster recovery posture.

SDS requires maintenance and support for existing Cohesity equipment. Cohesity is needed to backup and store data from virtual and physical servers in both on-Prem data centers and our Azure cloud service provider. Any loss of access or service outage would create a catastrophic issue with the smooth delivery and storage of data, disaster recovery issues, and create discovery problems for any Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and data requests.

FY25 Cohesity Renewals is currently utilizing the Cohesity backup appliance and software solution for all backups for the SDS production environment. Cohesity is needed to backup and store data from virtual and physical servers in both on-Prem data centers and SDS’s Azure Cloud service provider. Currently, over 2 Terabytes (TB) of data in storage are managed by the Cohesity application.

The storage devices have been integrated into the current backup infrastructure and supports disaster recovery of the systems in the event of an outage/failure. The Cohesity appliances cluster provides compatibility and consistency as well as meets disaster recovery needs and maintains a homogenous environment. This renewal provides SDS’s limited support staff the ability to provide better IT support by focusing on a single manufacturer, better coordinate hardware warranty support, and maintenance with one manufacturer instead of several. Moreover, the Cohesity backup appliance integrates seamlessly with the existing Cohesity backup environment as well as current VMware infrastructure. 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.

has deployed a variety of "equivalent yet different ‘brand name’ hardware materials and equipment by manufacturers such as Cisco and HP. has experienced situations where vendor-unique integrated tools and equipment from different manufacturers vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer, which created incompatibility between critical components. This incompatibility increases support and maintenance costs including the need to re-learn systems, maintain multiple maintenance agreements, non-compatible spare parts, increase system related software inventory, which negatively impacts the ability to perform rapid local disaster recovery in the event of system failure, and inhibits consolidation and reuse of existing systems.

In 2019, 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.

• SWPS identified three vendor solutions that provide backup/restore capabilities for Windows resources and there as follows:

o Cohesity, o Commvault Simpana, and o Veritas NetBackup

• SWPS conducted an analysis of the requirements across the selected solutions – see the attached technical comparison document entitled Appendix B_ ‘Cohesity_Commvault_VeritasNBU 2019.xls’ for the results of the analysis.

• Post comparison, SWPS identified Cohestiy as the solution best suited to meet the identified system requirements.

• Therefore, SWPS recommended for 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 and validated that Cohesity was able to do what needed, and it passed all tests of functionality needed for Cloud-to-Cloud backup and it integrated well with the existing backup solution had at the time.

needs Cohesity for the following reasons:

• The Veritas backup appliances and catalog does not scale with cloud to on prem or cloud backups

• Cohesity is Cloud to Cloud built and offers on prem appliances that dovetail into the SDS current backup solution.

• SDS expects to migrate 110TB of on premise to cloud to Cloud to Cloud backups over the next 2-3 years and needs a solution that can start at 10TB and scale to 110TB and beyond. Cohesity has this scalability and cloud functionality.

• Cohesity has built in key encryption and key management to encrypt all data in flight and at rest.

• Cohesity replicates, compresses, deduplicates from site to site with Amazon, Azure, Google and on premise directly, securely, and dynamically connects distributed infrastructure and digital systems Platform Equinix™ via global, software-defined interconnection.

• Cohesity is designed for scalability, agility and connectivity over a self-service portal or App.

Additional market research was conducted in September 2024. The market research concluded that the Cohesity brand name is the alternative that can satisfy SDS’s requirements because it is better than Veritas for its functionality, services and support;

and less complex and less costly to deploy than Commvault. Market research was conducted by querying Google, the General Service Administration (GSA) eLibrary, GSA 2GIT, and the NASA SEWP V Market Research Tool. It was determined 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 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. 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.

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

It was determined that several contractors have authority to resell the above-referenced appliance. The requirement will be competed among SEWP V contract-holders who are authorized to sell Cohesity Products. 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.

of its Oracle and SQL databases. The SDS network has a very limited number of support staff, so standardization of equipment and related essential components and peripherals are imperative to maintaining the infrastructure. The standardization is based on the Agency's history with the interoperability, durability, ease of installation, and maintenance on the existing Cohesity brand name appliance. In addition, SDS has found equipment standardization to be extremely effective in controlling cost, reducing downtime, and interchanging internal hardware parts.

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.

plans to test additional product lines for compatibility in preparation of future acquisitions as equipment becomes End of Life (EOL). When selecting future disaster recovery hardware, as always, SDS will research backup storage appliances available on the market and determine whether there is a need to or a benefit in changing the platform from Cohesity to another backup storage manufacturer. At the present time, no other actions are available which could remove competition barriers for the required products. This brand name items will be solicited to small business NASA SEWP V GWAC holders, Group B in accordance with FAR 16.505(a)(4)(iii)(A)(2).

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.

Date

Contracting Officer Certification:

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

Date