The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has put out a tender for high-speed direct connections between its data centers and cloud service providers (CSPs).
According to the tender, published on August 6, the FDA seeks connections from its Ashburn data center (ADC) and White Oak data center (WODC) to Amazon Web Services (AWS) US Commercial and GovCloud East & GovCloud West, as well as Azure for Government.
The interconnect must utilize MACSEC encryption and have a high data transfer bandwidth at or above Gigabit circuits.
The tender adds: "The acquisition will include the network circuits that connect FDA data centers to the Interconnect Service Provider data centers, interconnect Service, technical support, and professional services to install, configure, test, and deploy the Interconnect Service to production."
This is hoped to improve network performance and reduce latency issues between the FDA network and CSPs, increase network bandwidth needed to migrate large applications and data sets from on-premises data centers to the cloud, and to provide secure connections to the CSPs that meet Federal cloud computing regulations.
According to a document attached to the tender, the Office of Digital Transformation (ODT) in 2019 entered into a five-year contract with Equinix to acquire two EA 10Gbps Interconnect Circuits along with the associated equipment, racks space, and power to host at their DC 1 and DC 3 data centers in Ashburn, Virginia.
The document adds: "Equinix provides 10G Ethernet Private Line (EPL) circuits from DC1 to ADC, and DC3 to WODC, which ODT secures using MACSEC end-to-end encrypted cross-connects between the ODT DC1/DC3 racks, and the nearest AWS Direct Connect interconnection points in Equinix DC2/DC11. ODT uses an AWS Public VIF, and multiple IPSEC VPN tunnels for encrypted connections to the CSPs via the 10G Equinix Fabric service at both DC1 & DC3."
The Equinix port access is, however, not an end-to-end MACSEC-enabled solution. "The FDA reserves the unilateral right to replace the Equinix Fabric with multiple Single Fiber Cross Connects to achieve MACSEC compliance," the document states.
In addition, the contractor should provide additional pricing for increased bandwidth in its application.
The acquisition will use Lowest Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) source selection procedures. Applicants have until August 15 to submit offers, with the government planning to select one contractor for the job.
According to a December 2023 document, the FDA Global IT Enterprise consists of 398 systems and applications, 115 of which are in the cloud, along with 20 petabytes of data stored.
The FDA's September 2023 IT strategy covering the period 2024-2027 includes in its goals to "strengthen IT infrastructure." This is further broken down into providing flexible infrastructure offerings and accelerating cloud adoption. The department is currently a known customer of both AWS and Microsoft Azure.
