On 3/23/14 10:48 AM, Paul wrote:
On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Bob Camp <li...@rtty.us> wrote:
I suspect that what NIST is looking for is somebody in the cloud business
(Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM) to step up and mention that they have
2,989,875 server racks scattered about the world and they would be happy to
run NTP on them for "free". (see fine print attached ....)
There's no mention of compensation in the solicitation for input
An RFI isn't a solicitation (an offer to buy). It's more the
equivalent of mailing away for everyone's sales literature. If costs
are mentioned in someone's response, that might help NIST figure out
their cost/benefit and make vs buy analyses. For most RFIs, the
responses are public.
however
they do want some things that might or might not fit the business models of
the large server companies:
-) Traceable time.
0) 180 day hold-over in the absence of GPS (presumably with less than a
microsend error).
1) Dedicated (low-latency) links to the UTC(NIST) ensemble
2) Notable oversight by NIST.
3) Geo dispersion.
Point three may seem a no-brainer but it disqualifies Amazon if they're
using only native infrastructure. It sounds like they want what they
should have gotten from Certichron/USTiming but didn't.
I suspect the best candidates would be someone like Hurricane or Equinix
with the Level3s in the second tier.
Or, they might be looking for someone to be a system integrator, and put
it all together. That's what an RFI is all about.. get the ideas from
people who have them, so that when the solicitation does come out,
they're looking to buy something that someone is willing to sell.
It might also help them figure out what kind of budget they will need.
Note well that you don't have to be a provider of services to respond to
the RFI. If you have good ideas, but aren't able to implement them, for
whatever reason (maybe you personally don't want to be running a
business), you can still send them to NIST, and they'll factor into
their decision making and planning process.
When I've been involved in issuing RFIs in the past, often the best
ideas come from people/firms who aren't in the business. The folks in
the business are often loathe to publicly put their ideas out there,
because they fear it will telegraph information to their competitors
about future business plans. If you're not planning on competing, what
do you care who knows about your ideas.
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