Request for Information F5 Load Balancer

Request for Information 36C10B27Q0089

I. Introduction

This is a Request for Information (RFI) only. Do not submit a Proposal. This notice is not to be construed as a commitment on the part of the Government to award a contract, nor does the Government intend to pay for any information submitted as a result of this request. The Government does not reimburse respondents for any costs associated with submission of the information being requested or reimburse expenses incurred for responses to this RFI. The information provided may be used by the VA in developing its acquisition strategy and Performance Work Statement (PWS). Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted or competition sensitive information contained in their response. This is a request for information and does not obligate the Government in any way, nor does it commit the Government to any specific course of action.

II. Background and Scope
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Management (OM), Financial Services Center (FSC) has a requirement for the replacement of its current F5 load balancers and software to manage and re-distribute (balance) the flow of network traffic through FSC’s network data centers located at 1615 Woodward Street, Austin TX, and 5000 Wissahickon Ave, Philadelphia PA. Additionally, the FSC requires migration services and load balancer hardware and software maintenance services to ensure the load balancer solution operates as designed. FSC’s current existing environment has one standalone and two HA pair BIG-IP i5820-DF platforms located in the Austin Enterprise Data Center (AEDC) and the Philadelphia Enterprise Data Center (PEDC). These devices are currently running TMOS v17.5.1.x, utilizing BIG-IP LTM, APM, and FIPS for application delivery and user authentication.
The FSC requires a software that can process data quickly, support higher information exchanges and process greater amounts of AI applications. FSC requires the load balancing software to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers to prevent any single server from becoming overloaded and ensure that applications remain accessible to users by providing redundancy and managing failovers. FSC requires greater than the average processing speed based on the volume of data exchange that it is currently designing its infrastructure to handle.

FSC requires current configurations to be migrated to a new standalone and tenant pair of BIG-IP r5920-DFs in a 1:1 manner, anticipated to be on a similar or matching tenant