USDA RFQ: Agriculture Research Service (ARS) Secure Data Enclave Services IDIQ

Notice ID: 1232SA24Q0053

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistical agencies and units, Economic Research Service (ERS), National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS), and Agricultural Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) seek to procure data enclave services to serve as a secure computing and collaboration workspace. This workspace will be a highly controlled, secure space for both USDA employees and approved external users across the United States that allows them to conduct approved research and work with restricted-access datasets. The enclave will allow any USDA agency requiring secure workspace to collaborate across agencies or with external users and has application outside just the statistical agencies and units. This requirement will allow USDA the continuity to provide data users access to restricted-access data in a secure enclave environment.

REQUIREMENTS AND DELIVERABLES

Enclave Technical Requirements

Scalability.  The platform will need to be a state-of-the-art, cloud-based, scalable environment for USDA to be able to meet developing needs of researchers and the participating agencies. This involves the capacity to implement continuing improvements to the development strategy, enclave design, and appropriate technology to ensure the sustainability of the data enclave and meet increased or expanding workloads and operational demands. The ability to onboard all relevant USDA staff members is necessary. Cost efficiency in scalability is ideal. Scalability will enable USDA to respond appropriately and cost-effectively to evolving needs for increased storage and performance. The Enclave should follow ‘scalability in depth’ design to enable end to end scalability in its core infrastructure. Agencies/Projects can acquire additional end user computing, database, and storage resources to meet their growth needs and similarly, they can release these resources when they no longer need them. To support the growing number of project workspaces, researcher accounts, and data volume, the scalability is embedded in the following three layers:

• An End User Compute (App stream Images) – An end user compute that offers both vertical and horizontal scalability …
• Database – The amount of data that individual projects need to analyze is growing exponentially as is the number of researchers who need to analyze this growing set of data. USDA requires an enclave that can deploy a massively parallel processing database solution to successfully meet this demand of continually growing volume of data and higher analytical needs …
• Storage –
  • Structured Data – The single instance of a database solution can scale up to storing 16PB (Petabyte) of structured data and can stand up additional database instances as the need arises.
  • Unstructured Data – The ability to host at least 5PB of unstructured data, with the ability to stand up additional unstructured data storage as the need arises.
  • Data Archival and Restoration – Inactive data and/or user workspace can be archived and later restored as necessary …

The ordering period for this IDIQ shall be five years from the effective date.

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