This contract notice invites interested operators to submit tenders to a procurement.

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.

Each selected operator will be awarded a framework agreement that covers 3 R&D phases.

The 3 phases are:

— R&D up to solution design,

— R&D up to a prototype,

— 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.

The selected operators will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate during the PCP and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of the developed solutions i.e. beyond the procurers.

Tenders shall be submitted via the lead Procurer's e-tendering platform, https://cds.cern.ch/. The precise URLs for submitting tenders and instructions for using the platform are communicated by email to Tenderers that access the Request for Tender documents on the project website (https://www.archiver-project.eu/) and indicate that they will submit a tender.