VA seeks storage on demand solution

Veterans Affairs's enterprise operations group is researching the market for what’s available to support its storage on demand strategy.

This strategy, sometimes referred to as utility computing, would enable data centers to position large amounts of storage platforms on the computer room floor and only be charged when used, or on-demand.

Under a preliminary work statement, a company would provide on-demand storage solutions to include designing, delivering, installing, and maintaining storage capacity infrastructure at the current VA enterprise operations computing facilities.

A storage on demand strategy, coupled with management services, will provide VA with a holistic storage service offering in a timely manner. To meet customers’ data-storage requirements, the agency has to maintain a large amount of storage. It’s not cost effective to maintain large volumes of unused storage. That increases the storage costs and becomes challenging with such technologies as cloud computing.

For the market research, VA wants to know if commercial products are available already, commercial pricing practices, and how to structure the contract type.

The contract is expected to last five years.

VA EO is taking responses until Feb. 28.