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To stimulate an open dialogue with companies interested in the ARCHIVER project, all information given in answers to questions raised by potential suppliers during the Request for Tender period will be documented and published in this section.
This page will be regularly updated as new questions are answered.
The DOI of the “State of the Art, Community Requirements and OMC Results Report” provided in the Request for Tenders (section 2.4) and the Functional Specifications (section 3) is incorrect. On both documents, the DOI goes to: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3613577. The correct DOI is: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3618215.
The European Commission has confirmed that for the purposes of evaluating responses to the ARCHIVER Request for Tenders, the United Kingdom shall be considered as an EU Member State. This is relevant in particular to Compliance Criteria CC.2 (Annex 3: Compliance Questionnaire, section 2.2) which states that “The majority of the R&D services (as defined in section 3.1 of the Request for Tenders) over all three Phases, including in particular the principal researchers working for the PCP Contracts, shall be located in EU Member States or Horizon 2020 Associated Countries.
In light of the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak, the ARCHIVER Request for Tenders deadline is extended to 14 April 2020 – 4:00 pm (expressed in Europe/Zurich time zone).
The timeline for the PCP described in section 3.3 of the Request for Tenders is updated below. An updated version of the Deliverables and Milestones document is annexed to this clarification (made directly available on the Lead Procurer’s e-tendering platform, and on the RfT document available by download from the project’s website).
In light of the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak, the ARCHIVER Request for Tenders deadline is extended to 28 April 2020 – 4:00 pm (expressed in Europe/Zurich time zone).
The timeline for the PCP described in section 3.3 of the Request for Tenders is updated below. An updated version of the Deliverables and Milestones document is annexed to this clarification (made directly available on the Lead Procurer’s e-tendering platform, and on the RfT document available by download from the project’s website).
The Buyers Group continues to assess the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak on the ARCHIVER project and reserves the right to amend the project schedule to take this into account. Any amendments to the project schedule will be communicated during Call-offs.
Milestone |
Expected date(s) |
---|---|
Contract Notice published in TED and Request for Tenders published |
31 January 2020 |
Two information session for Tenderers |
07 February 2020 and 18 March 2020 |
Deadline for submission of questions related to the Request for Tenders |
10 March 2020 |
18 March 2020 |
|
Deadline for the submission of Tenders |
28 April 2020 |
Opening of Tenders |
29 April 2020 |
Notification to Tenderers of the results of the Tender evaluation and publication of contract award notice in TED |
14 May 2020 |
Standstill period |
18 May to 01 June 2020 |
Deadline for signature of Framework Agreements and Work Orders for Phase 1 with successful Tenderers |
05 June 2020 |
Phase 1 |
08 June 2020 – 09 October 2020 |
Phase 1 kick-off event |
2nd week of June 2020 (08 June – 12 June) |
Intermediate review for Phase 1 |
1st week of September 2020 (01 September – 04 September) |
End of Phase review |
2nd week of October 2020 (05 October – 09 October) |
Deadline for the completion of Phase 1[1] |
09 October 2020 |
Notification to Contractors of the results of the Phase 1 assessment |
16 October 2020 |
Launch of the Call-off for Phase 2 |
21 October 2020 |
Deadline for submission of Tenders for Phase 2 |
11 November 2020 |
Opening of offers for Phase 2 |
12 November 2020 |
Notification to the Tenderers of the results of the Phase 2 Tender evaluation |
27 November 2020 |
Deadline for signature of the Work Orders for Phase 2 with successful Tenderers |
04 December 2020 |
Phase 2 |
07 December 2020 – 21 May 2021 |
Phase 2 kick-off event |
2nd week of December 2020 (07 December – 11 December) |
Intermediate review for Phase 2 |
3rd week of February 2021 (15 February – 19 February) |
End of Phase review for Phase 2 |
3rd week of May 2021 (17 May – 21 May) |
Deadline for the completion of Phase 26 |
21 May 2021 |
Notification to Contractors of the results of the Phase 2 assessment |
04 June 2021 |
Launch of the Call-off for Phase 3 |
07 June 2021 |
Deadline for submission of Tenders for Phase 3 |
28 June 2021 |
Opening of offers for Phase 3 |
29 June 2021 |
Notification to the Tenderers of the results of the Phase 3 Tender evaluation |
13 July 2021 |
Deadline for signature of the Work Orders for Phase 3 with successful Tenderers |
23 July 2021 |
Phase 3 |
26 July 2021 – 30 November 2021 |
Phase 3 kick-off event |
4th week of July 2021 (26 July – 30 July) |
Intermediate review for Phase 3 |
4th week of September 2021 (20 September – 24 September) |
End of Phase review for Phase 3 |
4th week of November 2021 (22 November – 26 November) |
Deadline for the completion of Phase 36 |
30 November 2021 |
Notification to Contractors of the results of the Phase 3 assessment |
15 December 2021 |
[1] Tenderers shall comply with any intermediate milestones and delivery dates indicated in the Deliverables and Milestones document.
A1. The two are not mutually exclusive. The Results generated as a result of the PCP Contracts will belong to the Contractor. ARCHIVER favours Tenders that commit to making these Results available under Open Source licensing conditions.
A2. The aim is to have at least two contractors during the pilot phase. Please refer to section 3.4 of the Request for Tenders for further information.
A3. Yes, this is technically possible.
A4. The requirements will not be modified. A Tender that does not meet the minimum stated requirements will be discarded and cannot result in a PCP Contract.
A5. The Results developed during the project are intended to respond to the long-term data preservation and archiving needs of public sector scientific research organisations generally, not just in the four scientific domains of the four procurers (for which deployment scenarios are provided).
A6. In this context, M1.2 is requiring access to a "demo version" of your current solutions, in terms of current functionality. This demo access shall reflect the baseline state of the art, with up to 100 TB of capacity.
A7. The 100 TB access are required by the Buyers Group for assessment of the current solutions. At this stage, they shall reflect the total capacity for all datasets and assessments.
A8. All the requirements are functional and do not necessitate the use of any specific technology.
A9. The correct standard mentioned in the received question shall read ISO 16363 and not 19363. D1.6 is not asking for conformance but instead for a self-assessment of the tenderer. In other words, where is the tenderer situated in the process that leads to compliance either in the CoreTrustSeal or ISO 16363 frameworks? Concerning the additional aspects referred in the question, the tenderer shall demonstrate the technical and organisational measures in place in order to comply with the process foreseen in 19086 for SLAs, how the FAIR principles are being followed (there is no standard for FAIR yet, but your attention is drawn to the outputs of the EOSC FAIR WG (https://www.eoscsecretariat.eu/working-groups/fair-working-group, which may be used as a reference) and how is GDPR being respected "by design" respectively for the Architecture Design Document (D1.4), Prototype in Phase 2 (D2.4) and Pilot in phase 3 (D3.4).
A10. The virtual price is the price that the Buyers Group would pay for the services in a scenario of exclusive development (please refer to section 8.1 and 8.2 of the Request for Tenders). The Buyers Group will verify that the actual price is lower than the virtual price, reflecting investment made by the Tenderer in the project on account of the risk- and benefit-sharing approach of the PCP Contract. This precludes the possibility of ‘state aid’. Other than this verification, the virtual price is not taken into account for the evaluation of the Tenders.
It should be noted, however, that the quantities/number of hours and resources indicated by the Tenderer in the breakdown of the virtual price for Phase 1 in Annex 5 represent a commitment on the part of the Tenderer.
A11. ‘Data preservation and archiving services’ does not include the simple provision of infrastructure for storage in the cloud. Infrastructure provision in the Petabyte range will address Layer 1 (please refer to section 2.1 of the Functional Specification). Data Preservation and Archiving software services will be for Layer 2-4. The degree of integration across infrastructure providers and the archiving and preservation software layers will define the real innovation that can be achieved.
A12. The tables in the ‘summary’ tab and the ‘price breakdown’ tab pertaining to the ‘other Consortium member’ shall be duplicated as needed, and renamed as ‘subcontractor’ or similar in the case of a subcontractor.
A13. Your attention is drawn to the definition of the term “Solution”, which means a service or set of services for archiving and data preservation following the OAIS reference model, deployed in the cloud or in a hybrid model, able to handle petabytes of data and sustained high ingestion rates (approximately 1-10 GB/s). Third-party services can be included in the resulting solution if they comply with the requirements defined in the PCP Contracts. Specifically, the need to be available through a central EOSC service catalogue access point so that a researcher has access to the full set of ARCHIVER services, being able to trial them, evaluate their functionality for her/his specific research field and, in the future, purchase them with a clear costing model taking into account all the associated cost influencing factors and, if needed, be able to repatriate and recover research data seamlessly to another location by the end of the contract and usage period.
A14. In other words, it is expected that the tenderer will describe the technical capabilities and scalability of the resulting solution in terms of the defined criteria.
A15. The Buyers Group has four members (CERN, DESY, EMBL and IFAE-PIC). Please refer to section 2.5.2 of the Request for Tenders. The expectation is to have an approximate number of two technical members of each of the Buyers accessing the ticketing system.
A16. Your attention is drawn to section 8.1 of the Request for Tenders. The contractor is expected to commercially exploit the Results developed during the PCP. This Award Criteria will be used to evaluate the tenderers ability and readiness to commercialise the Results. The tenderer shall therefore describe how it will commercially exploit the Results and bring a viable product or service to market, including proposed licensing and software arrangements. The Tenderer will explain why it has chosen this approach to commercialisation. The Tenderer will indicate its target market and the reasons why it is targeting this market. The Tenderer shall estimate the time to market.
A17. In general, there are no strict requirements in terms of volumes through the phases 2 and 3 but we do expect agile feedback cycles to test deployments. In the prototype Phase, Functional testing will start, and the capacity availability shall be staged and shall not be over 1 PB. In the Pilot phase, performance and scalability will be among the main aspects to test, storage capacity shall not be over 5 PB. During this phase, particular focus will be given to the viability of the implementation of exit strategies.
A18. Contractors are NOT required peer to the Buyers Group Data Centers directly. In order to ensure large end to end network capacity (in multiples of 10 GB/s) between the Contractor’s facilities and the Buyers Group data centres. Contractors are required to peer to the GÉANT network. Please find more on this topic in the Functional Specification document which reads Peering to GÉANT is essentially supported in four modes, depending on the use case:
The Buyers Group will consider equivalent alternatives to peering to GÉANT (in terms of bandwidth capacity, performance and egress/ingress conditions) presented by the Tenderer. In this case, the Tenderer must elaborate on details concerning the network connectivity options available offering equivalent service features. These details must include information about egress/ingress charges during the project and after the project in case of future purchase of the resulting services.
A19. One of the overall aims in Phase 1 is a written detailed solution design, a system architecture, and a technical design of all the components. This implies that it is necessary to describe how network connectivity will be established from the contractor’s services to the GÉANT network, but not to have the demo platform already connected. Concerning Authentication and Authorisation, the Buyers Group except Tenderers to have Authorisation a& Authentication schemes in place that can be assessed and tested in order to understand the effort to integrate the Tenderer SPs with the IdPs in eduGAIN or other research community AAI services that will be available in the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) context.
A20. The GÉANT connectivity requirement is explained in Q18. The requirement is necessary to be in place from the Prototype Phase. This said, the time needed to fulfil the requirement should not be underestimated. The Buyers Group expectation is that selected Contractors have their plans for connectivity in place and are communicated during the Design Phase.
A21. Please refer to Q17.
A22. In general, the Buyers Group estimate a minimum bandwidth of 10 Gbps from the Tenderer data centre to the GÉANT network and a minimum of 40 Gbps may be required during the testing periods in the pilot phase. Test scheduling will be performed as required in agreement between selected contractors and the Buyers Group.
A23. The contractor data centre locations are of exclusive responsibility of the Tenderers. If the questions refers to the Buyers Group data center locations : they are in Geneva in the case of CERN, in Hinxton (UK) for EMBL-EBI, Hamburg (Desy) and Barcelona (IFAE/PIC).
A24. Please refer to Q17.
A25. The number of instances to be purchased will depend on the type of data to be archived, on strategies to prevent vendor lock-in, and on payment schedules. So, for example, an instance may be purchased each year to archive 300 TB of data acquired from an instrument over that year that needs to be preserved for 5 years, using a single payment mode and a suitable SLA. Or an instance may be "purchased" once to archive all high-level data products from a completed experiment which need to be preserved for decades, using a yearly payment model with an agreed price revision policy and a suitable SLA including an exit strategy.
A26. DESY has currently a few thousands of individual users for all three accelerators in operation with an expected increasing number of users interacting with an archive system of 500-700 per year.
A27. The current 3 (facilities) photon science accelerators will represent ~50 beamlines. We expect beamline common archive policies (largely influenced by lab wide data policies and facility specific extensions on that) to be grouped into roughly 20-30 larger groups dealing with common archiving activities.
Any further question can be sent to procurement.service@cern.ch using the form contained in Appendix C of the Request for Tenders before 10 March 2020 at 16:00 (expressed in Europe/Zurich time zone).