The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday awarded a potential $995.9 million contract to Hewlett Packard [HPQ] to continue providing services to its Data Center 2 while the department continues to work toward an Enterprise Computing Services (ECS) model of data center support.
The department also said it shortly plans to award Computer Sciences Corp. [CSC] a potential $967.5 million contract to continue providing support to Data Center 1, which is government-owned and has been operated by CSC sine July 2008. Data Center 2 has been contractor-owned and operated by HP Enterprise Services since September 2007.
HP’s contract contains a $201.2 million base year and four on-year options worth close to $200 million each. The pending award to CSC includes a $104.1 million six-month base period and four one-year options worth between $212 million and $219 million each.
DHS announced the awards in the May 26 FedBizOpps.gov and said the award to HP was made on May 12.
The task orders that will be awarded under the respective indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts are for a range data storage and management services.
DHS currently has five data centers, down from 22 when the department initiated a consolidation effort in 2005. DHS provides enterprise computing services through Data Centers 1 and 2. The other data centers are operated by the Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The transition to the Enterprise Computing Services acquisition effort “is designed to leverage the successes of data center consolidation with the Federal ‘Cloud First’ mandate and the flexibility, agility, and savings being offered by emerging cloud computing technologies,” DHS said. The ECS effort is being led by the department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.
The department also said that the new “ECS solution will incorporate shared on-demand cloud storage and services as well as at least one brick and mortar data center,” DHS said in the Justification and Approval document outlining the HP and pending CSC awards and status of the ECS effort. “This new model will enable DHS to respond more nimbly to innovations in the marketplace as well as reduce costs to the taxpayer.”
For the ECS effort, DHS in December 2014 contracted with the management consulting firm Mason Harriman Group to provide independent verification and validation services and to assist the chief information officer with requirements gathering and other aspects of the procurement as well as monitoring of the ECS pilot.
The pilot consists of several different types of actions, including pilot projects lasting up to three years for cloud challenges such as disaster recovery between data center and public cloud. Other actions include proof of concept efforts to test discrete design ideas and one- to two-year prototypes that simulate a full system or a significant part of it.
The pilots and other efforts are in various stages of implementation and planning and are a “first step” in the data center changeover coming with the ECS, DHS sais. The department expects that once the pilot is complete, it will take about two years to transition data center services to new providers under the ECS model.
DHS said that more than 200 vendors have expressed interest in participating in the ECS model.