State plans small-business competition for data center consolidation

The State Department plans to hire a small-business contractor from its Hybrid IT Services contract to support the agency's data center consolidation program, according to a notice published today.

State’s Bureau of Information Resource Management needs support with the planning, architecture, engineering and documentation of its program to consolidate servers into its Enterprise Server Operations Centers, according to a presolicitation notice on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

According to the notice, the department needs help with services such as hardware and software evaluation and recommendations, configuration management system design and implementation, physical server virtualization and transition, and local area network administration support for server transition and consolidation.

State said it plans to compete a firm, fixed-price task order for the consolidation support under  the Hybrid Information Technology Services for State contract, which has a pool of  about 20 small business contractors.

The notice indicated that the department plans to fund the project using the money it received under the economic stimulus law; however, the notice did not provide a specific figure for this work.