The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Information Management has plans to establish a $6.4 million information technology center to consolidate two existing facilities in the Washington, D.C. area.
The NNSA began modernizing its information technology (IT) facilities with its fiscal year 2022 budget in order to establish data center space and “increase capacity for expanding NNSA mission requirements, obtain flexibility and scalability that allows additional capacity” to include space, power, and bandwidth, the agency said in a notice posted to the federal government’s contracting website.
In order to establish the data center “quickly and inexpensively, consolidate inefficient infrastructure and improve security posture,” the NNSA is awarding the $6.4 million contract to Manassas, Virginia-based QTS Federal for a five-year operating lease, which is a one year base contract and four option years.
The NNSA’s current East Coast IT footprint is divided between the Department of Energy’s James V. Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C., and NNSA offices in Germantown, Maryland. In the Forrestal building, NNSA’s equipment is housed in nine rooms spread over four floors with a combined estimated 2,772 square feet.
In Germantown, the equipment is spread between three rooms on two floors in 869 square feet, according to the notice.
“Neither location was originally built to host a large data center and do not provide the space, cooling and power needed to support NNSA’s future growth requirements,” the notice says. “NNSA seeks to vacate or transfer major computer and network services from both locations to a collocated commercial data center facility on the East Coast of the United States, to provide the disaster recovery, failover, and load balancing capability needed for NNSA mission-critical systems and applications.”
“Constructing compliant data center space is expensive, and build-out costs are highly difficult to forecast with current supply-chain challenges and rapidly increasing construction costs,” the NNSA said in the notice. “Build-out estimates for comparable space would see a cost of minimum of $5M-7M and would possibly exceed $10M with 12-18 months of construction time. Current supply chain delays may extend build-out costs by an additional year and may increase actual costs.”
With the move, the agency also wants to become more energy efficient and save cost by moving to cloud services and “inter-agency shared services in an ecosystem of partners in the same facility.”
