Patent & Trademark Office, Information Technology Contracts Office, Box 14, Washington, DC 20231

70 -- ACQUISTION OF MASS DATA STORAGE DEVICES DUE 060199 POC Dave Sibik (703)305-4176 The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is seeking potential sources to provide maintenance and support services for its existing EMC data storage systems, and for expanding its capacity with compatible data storage systems with price/performance that is equal to or better than is currently provided by EMC. The PTO's requirements may consist of the following: 1. Maintenance for existing EMC data storage systems. The PTO currently operates 31 EMC RAID-array storage systems with a combined capacity of 37.5 Terabytes formatted and available to its nearly 100 Hewlett Packard Unix (HP/UX) and more than 200 NT servers. Maintenance support required for these devices is 24-hour, 7 days per week with a maximum 2-hour response and maximum 4-hour repair to all reported failures. This maintenance will be needed as warranty maintenance expires over a staggered schedule beginning in June 1999. 2. Storage Area Network (SAN) capabilities. The PTO requires storage systems that can provide SAN capabilitiessuch as through fiber-channel switches to HP/UX and NT servers. This includes storage management that allows dynamic reallocation of storage and concurrent updates to multiple redundant devices. 3. Estimated 10-15% increase in capacity by 2001, or another 4-6 Terabytes to handle growth, and maintenance for these additional devices. 4. Up to 100% increase in capacity starting in late 2001/early 2002 for operating from a second data center and include warranty/maintenance for these additional devices. The 2nd data center will be required to provide open systems storage capacity with multi-host connectivity. Storage sub-systems will need to be able to concurrently connect to UNIX, and Windows NT. Requirements include multiple connections per host with channel fail over and multi-pathing, establishment of a storage area network utilizing hubs and switches, with high availability and mission critical capability, and same level of operational performance from the data centers. Also required is software capable of managing the entire storage pool from one host, providing data protection and dynamic allocation between different hosts. Synchronous channel communication capabilities are required between potentially three data centers. Data communication between the potential the data centers should be able to support transfer of only changed data upon the execution of any updates or insertion of new data. 5. Support Services to support moves and data migration, including on-site customer engineer(s) and systems engineer(s) to assist with moves, migration of data, architecture and engineering services for a SAN and a tape backup system. Vendors with capabilities to meet any or all of the above requirements should submit within 10 working days of this RFI announcement a Capabilities Statement of less than 25 pages, product brochures, and at least 3 Past Performance references from customers with commensurate storage volume and complexity. The PTO will review the Capability Statement and select which vendor(s) warrant further consideration. The PTO may select up to three vendors for tests at the PTO ETC laboratory and a second site and/or the vendor's location. There will be a Requirements Briefing and/or more detailed capacity specifications provided to the selected vendors. The PTO is open to all alternatives, including hybrid configurations with EMC and other products. Further technical information is available on the PTO's home page (USPTO.Gov). Questions should be directed to Dave Sibik at (703) 305-4176. Posted 05/17/99 (W-SN332272). (0137)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0264 19990519\70-0015.SOL)