Public procurement notice: Contract Notice
Published: 2020-02-03
Buyer: European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Country: CH
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 48610000: Database systems | 72222300: Information technology services | 72317000: Data storage services | 73100000
Estimated value: 3400000 EUR
Submission deadline: 2020-03-31
Award criteria: The most economic tender
EU fund: Horizon Europe

Technical requirements: This PIN concerns a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP). CERN is appointed as the lead contractor to lead and coordinate the procurement on behalf of the buyers group listed in I.1.
Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP) to Buy R&D (Research and Development) Services for Archiving and Preservation for Research Environments
The procurement aims to trigger new solutions to be developed and tested to address the challenge of long-term, cloud-based preservation and archiving for scientific data in the petabyte volume range under F.A.I.R. principles following the OAIS reference model and related standards, while ensuring that research groups retain stewardship of their data sets. The innovative resulting services are expected to be integrated to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service catalogue.
The project will use the PCP instrument to competitively procure R&D services from several providers.
This PCP procurement is a joint procurement by different procurers across Europe that are all facing the same common challenge and are thus looking for similar solutions (so-called ‘buyers group’).
The procurement will take the form of a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) under which R&D service contracts will be awarded to a number of R&D providers in parallel in a phased approach. This will make it possible to compare competing alternative solutions.
— R&D up to original development, validation and testing of a limited set of first products or services.
After each phase, intermediate evaluations will be carried out to progressively select the best of the competing solutions. The contractors with the best-value-for-money solutions will be offered a specific contract for the next phase.
The innovative end-to-end archival and preservation services to be delivered in Archiver will tackle the following technical challenges:
— enabling effective petabyte range data management in a hybrid model, combining the procurers on-premise infrastructure with commercial cloud services,
— optimizing data access and ingestion at very high rates (1-10 Gbps/day) for use cases in multiple scientific domains,
— enabling efficient data content distribution anticipating access profiles evolution as cloud access becomes popular and scientific data volumes grow,
— providing high-end network connectivity through GÉANT network and Federated AAI for authentication and access control,
— adopting an approach based on standard practices, compliant with the OAIS reference model and the relevant series of standards (ISO 14721),
— exploring a cost effective business model taking into account data access patterns and archive longevity.

Eligibility requirements: The tenderer shall be able to demonstrate proven competence and experience in: — the performance of R&D services, — the domain of cloud computing, — the domain of data archiving and preservation. Additional criteria are stated in the procurement documents.

Award value: 3400000