I_04 SF 1012 Limited Sources Justification_Redacted.pdf

DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY

LIMITED-SOURCES JUSTIFICATION

This acquisition is conducted under the authority of the Multiple Award Schedule Program (see FAR 8.401)

Treasury Standard Form – 1012 (Rev 10/23)

Prescribed by Treasury: DTAP 1008.405-6 Tracking No.

4.b Supporting Rationale:

Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation (CI) is the law enforcement arm of the Internal Revenue Service. IRS-CI is charged with the enforcement of the federal income tax statutes. IRS-CI's top priority is the investigation of violations of the federal income tax law.

Additionally, CI special agents lend their financial investigative expertise to money laundering and narcotics investigations conducted in conjunction with other law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels.

The Digital Forensic Section (DF) is responsible for the acquisition, processing, and analysis of digital evidence related to ongoing criminal investigations. Its Electronic-Crimes Computing Environment (ECE) is a core environment to support DF’s mission. The ECE environment is housed in IRS-CI’s “CI-2 network” which is an environment completely independent from the IRS’ main network environment CI-2 is the General Support System approved infrastructure, ECE is the primary tenant in IRS-CI’s CI-2 environment.

The main purpose of the ECE is to allow Digital Forensics (DF) to process and share electronic data recovered during search warrants, subpoenas, summons and other legal processes to working case agents to meet its mention of the extraction and production of sound evidentiary data. DF uses ECE to share this data in various formats from raw data, to reports depending on the case need and usage. ECE allows for the data to reside in an off-network (C-2) environment that is sandboxed from ECE to help alleviate security issues.

DF is seizing data in terms of Petabytes, and smart devices now have Terabyte SSDs (Solid Storage Drives). These changes are placing a new and different dynamic on how evidence is collected and reviewed, making the ECE more vital in each criminal investigation CI’s special agents’ work. Because of these changes in and increase of electronic evidence, ECE must be upgraded to meet the rapid digitalization of the world.

In addition to DF’s needs, Cyber & Forensic Services Section (C&FS) runs software on ECE, such as Personable’ s ScanWriter program. This program allows for Bank Statements, Credit Card Statements as well as other recurring documents to be scanned, analyzed, and displayed in usable and custom formats.

IRS-CI’s Special Investigative Technique (SIT) Section’s Cover Agents also utilize special Virtual Machines setups on the CI-2 network to create documents for IRS-CI’s undercover law enforcement officers.

As such, the CI-2 network has become a vital tool in the current arsenal of investigative tools for its special agents. The CI-2 Network has expanded greatly with new tenants being added and new tools being utilized in a race to evolve with current technologies. CI-2 is a vital piece of infrastructure assisting in over (1,925) cases and (2,000) users benefiting from the system. As this is a system that is utilized throughout IRS-CI to allow different sections to upload data for various investigative purposes, CI-2 continues to expand from its initial case usage and the CI-2 system needs to be able to grow and expand seamlessly to preserve IRS- CI’s evidentiary data.

DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY

LIMITED-SOURCES JUSTIFICATION

This acquisition is conducted under the authority of the Multiple Award Schedule Program (see FAR 8.401)

Treasury Standard Form – 1012 (Rev 10/23)

Prescribed by Treasury: DTAP 1008.405-6 Tracking No.

display how many software licenses are utilized within a number of products from the same dashboard that shows how many users are actively connected. Visual and automated tools are critical to future success of ECE.

The HPE certified Nutanix equipment that was previously purchased for CI-2 was purchased to assist with the movement to an Object Based Storage Solution, and as a potential backup for the system. This pilot was test the feasibility and performance of Nutanix’s single plane computing compared to VMWare on Cisco blades with Pure Fibre Channel storage running CI-2/ECE application. Based on the successes of this pilot and market research comparing other Hyper -Converged Infrastructure providers on the market, HPE SimpliVity, Dell VXRail, it was decided to move the entire user environment to a Nutanix solution. With the buildout of the new equipment that was purchased in 2023 and delivered in early 2024 in Martinsburg, ECE needs that all of the previous hardware to be licensed. Because of the lengthy procurement and delivery timelines for the 90+ node cluster, IRS CI decided to reduce costs and license minimal hardware until the 90+ node cluster was deployed and operational.

This request is to procure Nutanix software licenses and hardware maintenance for the HPE pilot hardware that IRS CI chose not to renew for cost savings. Since this is software licenses only for existing equipment, it is critical this is brand name. Other brands of software and hardware maintenance would not support this equipment. With the buildout in Martinsburg expected to be completed this year, two other major projects (Systran and ScanWriter AI) are being added to the ECE project which will require all of the unlicensed hardware to be used.

Replacing brand new hardware only to license older hardware remaining from pilot would not be strategically nor cost effective for the government. IRS CI 90+ node cluster was approximately $7.2M on a $23M contract. The Nutanix effort has taken a 3-year pilot time, 10 month deployment time, and upwards of 20 full time personnel on the project to deploy this new platform. The Nutanix software needed to license existing HPE hardware is a very small fraction of the overall cost of the system. All hardware manufacturer’s devices have to be running the same Nutanix software to be part of the cluster. Cyber Security policies will not allow hardware to be part of a production system without hardware maintenance.

In October 2024 additional market research was conducted by John Casteel, the Subject Matter Expert.

GSA Advantage – A search by part number SW-NCP-ULT-FP yielded only one (1) OTS results, CARAHSOFT TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION.

GSA MAS 8F - We reached out to the manufacturer for a list of twenty-five small business approved resellers for Nutanix on GSA MAS 8F contracts (attached). Section J was completed with seven (7) authorized resellers from this list.

The budget estimate was derived by referencing market research quotes from GSA advantage eBuy small-business vendors and IRS-CI’s previous order of Nutanix 2032H5-23-F-00756 and applying a 2% yearly inflation rate. The quotes were averaged together and applied an inflation on top of the option years amounts that are currently under contract.

IRS-CI is not choosing to limit to competition and is open to any SEWP vendor whose product meets the specification requirements as stated in the LSJ and SOW.