The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has put out a Request for Information (RFI) for help reducing its data center footprint.

In a contract posting to Sam.Gov, the NSF states that it is seeking to reduce the scope of its on-prem IT infrastructure to enable it to have visibility into all of its IT spaces, using "Building Automation System, IT Asset Management, and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) tools."

The contract notes that NSF's current IT estate spans an Equinix colocation data center in Ashburn, Virginia, and an on-prem "Enhanced Communication Equipment Room" at its HQ in Alexandria, Virginia. The department also has a multi-cloud strategy, noting that the AWS Direct Connect in the Equinix data center is a key asset.

The NSF is responsible for advancing all fields of non-medical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics research and education in the United States, including the offering of grants and cooperative agreements to researchers and working with various academic, public, and private institutes in the US. Recent grants include $5m for Atlanta's Morehouse College for a supercomputer. The NSF also manages the Wyoming supercomputing center, but is seeking to offload the management responsibilities to a third party.

The decision to consolidate its IT has been motivated by the establishment of a new NSF HQ at 401 Dulany Street, Alexandria, covering 10 stories and 396,790 sq ft (36,860 sqm). The NSF's previous headquarters was located at 2415 Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria. The new site is smaller than the NSF's former HQ.

According to the contract, this "necessitates the design and build of the network topography on-premises in the new NSF Headquarters."

The new headquarters will have racks and servers located within the basement, and the NSF needs applicants to design the layout, cable and networking design, and power distribution for the data center. The network also needs to connect to the Equinix data center.

Equinix's Ashburn, Virginia, campus totals 12 data centers.