VA awards two deals for data center

The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded more than $680 million in contracts for products and services for its Austin Automation Center in Texas.

The AAC Enterprise System (AACES) contracts run for 10 years and provide hardware, software, and technical and professional services supporting the Austin data center. Logicon Inc. was awarded the lion's share with a $650 million deal, and Research Dynamics Inc. captured a small business set-aside worth more than $34 million, said Kraig Ruckel, chief of the technical infrastructure division at AAC.

Both contracts are for one base year and include nine one-year options, Ruckel said. Logicon had been on the original contract awarded in November 1991 through its parent company, Northrop Grumman Corp., but that deal ends in September and the VA wanted the current award to start Oct. 1, Ruckel said.

The AACES contracts cover products and services that include providing equipment and software and supporting AAC's desktop services, data entry, distribution and on-site peripheral equipment.

Project management, software development, systems integration and security engineering are among the IT services included in the contracts, according to a Logicon spokesman.

The new contracts also have a stronger focus on products and technology refreshes. Items ranging from mainframes to PC servers, tape silo subsystems, direct access storage devices and Unix servers are covered, the spokesman said.

AAC provides data center services for the VA as well as for other agencies. AAC receives no federal dollars and instead relies on customer funding.