Lockheed Martin lands $70 million Air Force contract

Lockheed Martin Corp. said June 26 it has been selected to provide up to 12 Air Force bases with technical services and data storage solutions to support the Air Force Materiel Command, one of the service's largest.

A team from Air Force Standard Systems Group in Montgomery, Ala., issued a task order against the Information Technology Services blanket purchase agreement to Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Md., for network storage solutions. The task order has a value of up to $70 million for one year and four one-year options.

Joining Lockheed Martin as teammates are Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., and Veritas Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif.

"Lockheed Martin worked closely with HP and Veritas Software to offer the Air Force the best modular approach for effective enterprise Storage Area Network solutions," said Domenic Costa, vice president of secure enterprise solutions at Lockheed Martin Systems Integration, Owego, N.Y.

Storage area network solutions consist of two tiers. The storage plumbing tier provides connectivity between nodes in a network and transports device-oriented commands and status. The second tier uses software to provide value-added services that operate over the first tier.

Lockheed Martin will provide systems integration and information technology expertise. HP will provide its Storage Works hardware, including the Enterprise Virtual Array and Enterprise Modular Array, delivering between 750 terabytes and 1 petabyte of storage capacity over the next five years.

Veritas will provide its storage management software for data protection, disaster recovery, storage virtualization, network storage and application availability, including backup and recovery, file and volume management and clustering and replication software.