Micetro Statement of Need.docx

Statement of Need (SON) Micetro

1. Background

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Operations and Engineering Branch (OEB), within the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology (OCICB), manages and develops the technology infrastructure that supports intramural research, extramural investments, and administrative operations. OEB provides IT services to more than 4,000 end users across over 20 locations throughout the United States.

These infrastructure services are maintained and operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and support a wide range of enterprise IT functions, including application hosting; audio/visual engineering; database administration; data center operations; enterprise storage; high-performance computing; platform management; networking and security; remote access; server development; unified communications; and workstation configuration and management.

2. Purpose

This is the renewal of Micetro supporting centralized management of approximately 23,000 IP addresses across NIAID infrastructure systems. The platform provides integrated management of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Address Management (IPAM) services used by infrastructure teams to maintain accurate, real-time visibility, administration, and control of enterprise network resources. Micetro is operationally necessary to NIAID's ability to centrally manage DHCP and IP address infrastructure, ensuring reliable network operations that support research systems, security services, and administrative platforms. The solution maintains IP address integrity, helps prevent address conflicts, automates IP address tracking and allocation, and provides consistent network configuration across environments supporting scientific and operational workloads. Centralized management improves operational efficiency, reduces administrative overhead, and enables timely response to network changes and incidents.

3. Period of Performance 9/13/2026-9/12/2027

4. Brand Name Product Men & Mice Micetro is required because it provides a mature, centralized platform for integrated IP Address Management (IPAM) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) administration that is already deployed and configured within the NIAID enterprise environment. The platform supports centralized management of approximately 23,000 IP addresses and provides a single interface for administering, monitoring, and auditing critical network addressing services across NIAID infrastructure.

Micetro is fully integrated with NIAID's existing network architecture, operational processes, and administrative workflows. Replacing the product with an alternate solution would require migration of IPAM data, redevelopment of administrative processes, reconfiguration of integrations, extensive testing, and staff retraining, introducing operational risk and increasing implementation costs. Such a transition could also disrupt network management activities and reduce visibility into enterprise IP address resources during migration.

Renewing the existing Micetro deployment preserves prior federal investment in the configured environment, maintains continuity of operations, and ensures uninterrupted vendor support, software updates, and security patches while avoiding unnecessary transition costs and operational disruption.

5. NIH Impact

Without this renewal, vendor support would lapse, resulting in the loss of software updates and security patches and increasing the risk of vulnerabilities and configuration issues. Continued operation without supported software may lead to IP address conflicts, DHCP service disruptions, reduced visibility into network resources, and longer incident resolution times, adversely affecting research systems, security tools, and administrative operations. Failure to renew would also increase operational costs associated with manual administration and troubleshooting, while placing prior federal investment in the configured and integrated Micetro IPAM environment at risk.