U.S. Labor Department Consolidating Data Centers Into ByteGrid Facility

bytegrid-mdc1

One of the battery rooms at BYTEGRID's data center in suburban Maryland. (Image: BYTEGRID)

The U.S. Department of Labor will be consolidating its data centers at the BYTEGRID data center in Silver Spring, Maryland. This huge win for BYTEGRID comes via systems integrator Lockheed Martin, which has been awarded a contract to transition and relocate the Department of Labor's data centers in metropolitan Washington, D.C. into BYTEGRID’s  facility. The agreement, known as an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, is for seven years.

“The deal validates what we’re doing in Maryland,” said BYTEGRID CEO Ken Parent. “It validates what we’re doing in the federal space with a high quality product.”

The Labor Department's migration is part of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), which plans to eliminate and/or consolidate 1,186 federal data centers by 2015, with a goal of saving $2.4 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). A rough history as well as progress was written up last November.

FDCCI Keeps Moving Forward

“The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative requires premium data centers able to meet the most stringent requirements for security, reliability, uptime, and compliance,” said Lynn Singleton, director of Environmental Services at Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions. “BYTEGRID’s secure, FISMA-compliant facility met all contractual requirements, enabling our team to support DOL’s mission needs.”

It’s hard to quantify how big a deal this is, but it's big. There is a dollar amount out there for the size of the overall contract of over $59 million. BYTEGRID is a big piece of that number.

The DOL selected the Lockheed Martin/BYTEGRID team for their abilities to provide a secure data center that meets the compliance standards for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). These services will allow DOL agencies the flexibility to grow and meet future functional needs with scalable dynamic computing capabilities such as managed hosting and cloud service technologies.

BYTEGRID’s Montgomery County, MD facility sits on an 11-acre campus, strategically located within the metro Washington, D.C. data center market.  BYTEGRID’s acquired the facility in 2011. It is the largest multi-tenant data center in Maryland featuring 214,000 sq. ft. of data center space and over 90,000 sq. ft. of raised floor.  It features new redundant power supply systems, providing a total of nine megawatts of critical load power, 22 megawatts of on-site power generation and cooling that exceed requirements for concurrent maintainability and fault tolerance, with future planned expansions to double critical load power capacity.

The carrier neutral facility is served by multiple telecommunications providers across diverse, redundant paths and is efficiently designed to provide BYTEGRID’s tenants an extremely competitive total cost of ownership. The 11-acre campus is entirely gated and integrates a full range of 24/7 physical and logical security features ranging from ballistic rated entrances and checkpoints to biometric registration and authorization systems.

Savings Via Consolidation, Cloud

The Department of Labor is consolidating to save money and operate in a more efficient environment. It will move some infrastructure to the cloud as well.

“The migration is happening over time,” said Parent. “A migration of any size is a huge undertaking. There’s a lot of anxiety between migrating ... it’s much more difficult than (deploying) a new platform. At a high level there are six to seven agencies within the department that will migrate over a period of time. It was a shared approach. The department identified shared resources from these six to seven agencies.”

“They’re creating savings and innovating by taking these agencies and moving together,” said BYTEGRID President Manny Mencia. Lockheed went out in early 2012 looking for a partner, and they selected BYTEGRID through a competitive process. BYTEGRID teamed on the RFP and we were awarded it in late third or early fourth quarter of 2012.

“The FDCCI is an initiative of significant national importance and unique opportunity for Maryland companies,” said Don Goodwin, BYTEGRID’s Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing.  “We are pleased to provide the critical data center infrastructure and innovative in-center cloud bursting, meeting all key government standards for security compliance.

In addition to the big success in Maryland, BYTEGRID executives indicated there will be more news to follow “Over the next two years, we anticipate moving from planning to execution in a few new markets,” said Parent. “We’re positioned well inside – we’re busy in all existing markets.” The company recently announced Cleveland, and says it is seeing very healthy demand. “Enterprises locally never had a wholesale alternative,” said Mencia.

ByteGrid’s leadership team includes executives with expertise spanning real estate, finance and facilities. It’s the latest example of a trend in which executive teams with industry experience team with capital partners to form new data center companies.