JA_Nutanix_Redacted.pdf

JUSTIFICATION

FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center

23 Christopher Way Eatontown, NJ 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a firm-fixed price delivery order to be issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for brand name Nutanix Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution which includes hardware, software, installation services, maintenance, and warranty. It also requires a Cisco fiber switch for interconnection of the backbone.

The Cisco switch meets all the requirements for the Nutanix cluster to function properly and allow OI&T to configure with the image.

3. Description of Services: The proposed service is to add on to the current Nutanix

HCI Infrastructure at Shreveport for up to 4 Nodes to interface with the existing Nutanix infrastructure, along with the associated Nutanix supported hypervisor. This is an infrastructure backups, redundancy, and Disaster Recovery. The Contractor shall provide, install, and configure a fully functional 4 Node that will serve as the foundation for the systems HCI solution. The contractor shall provide and install a Cisco fiber switch for interconnection of the backbone. The Cisco switch meets all the requirements for the Nutanix cluster to function properly and allow OI&T to configure with the image.

Contractor shall provide Nutanix Support and Maintenance services, which consists of 24x7x365 complete solutions maintenance and support for all hardware and software components of the proposed solution, including updates and patches as well as technical support available via telephone, email, and web during all hours (24 hours per day, 365 days per year). The Contractor shall provide US-soil-based support with a dedicated 24/7 “Federal only” support line. Parts replacement shall be delivered within 4 hours, not to exceed next business day. The Contractor shall provide Nutanix Professional Services and Project Management. A fully operational Nutanix HCI System is required 60 days after award.

This requirement entails a period of performance of 12 months. The total estimated value of the proposed action is

4. Statutory Authority: Pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.505(a)(4), the following brand name requirement is being justified and approved as an exception to fair opportunity under the statutory authority of Section 41 U.S.C.

4106(c)(2) as implemented by FAR Subpart 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B), entitled “Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of

Nutanix HCI solution quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized.”

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: This brand name justification is based on extensive market research, as described in section 8 of this document, it was determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for the required brand name Nutanix products. Shreveport VA has a requirement to provide true disaster recovery and maintain backups of critical healthcare technology applications delivered to internal customers at the Shreveport VA.

Given that Shreveport VAMC currently uses a 12 Node Nutanix cluster, the added requirement must be interoperable with the current Nutanix infrastructure. VA also requires a hypervisor agnostic solution that can provide a single management interface for multiple vendor hypervisor deployments. Shreveport Specifically, the Government requires a solution that provides virtual machine level configurability with one to one and many to many topologies, with subblock level granularity, compression over the wire and site deduplication. The Government requires this functionality due to limited network bandwidth. The Government also requires crash consistent and application consistent backup availability in the replication solution which will enable VA to achieve a near-synchronous replication of production data between the computing environments in Shreveport, for a full recovery to the alternate respective datacenter within minutes of a disaster. The Nutanix near sync technology allows us to accomplish this with this new requirement. The Government requires security features that include automated checks, self-healing, and multifactor authentication, and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)

140.2 cryptographic algorithms. These features are required to maintain security compliance within the Shreveport virtual infrastructure.

The Nutanix HCI solution is the only HCI solution that can meet the functional requirements of providing an HCI solution that is hypervisor agnostic and can allow for a single management interface for multiple vendor hypervisor deployments which include the Nutanix Acropolis, VMWare ESXi and the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors and be interoperable with the current virtual infrastructure. While other HCI solutions exist, none of them can meet the functional requirements and be interoperable with our current virtual infrastructure.

Failure to procure the needed brand name Nutanix HCI solution would prevent the Shreveport VA from providing real time data recover and proper backing up critical data and the required flexibility to manage the virtual infrastructure using multiple technologies. This would have a negative effect on VA’s healthcare operations at the Shreveport VAMC which overall affects the Veterans that Shreveport VAMC is providing care for on a daily basis.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in Section 8 of this document. This effort did not yield any additional sources that can meet the Government’s requirements. However, the undersigned VA technical