Litton/HP suite offers storage

Government agencies seeking a cost-effective way to manage their array of storage solutions have a new option.

Litton PRC Inc. announced last week that it has added its Storage on Demand Services (SODS) to the company's General Services Administration schedule for information technology.

The Litton PRC offering will include Hewlett-Packard Co.'s SureStore E Storage Solutions.

The SODS suite offers government clients an alternative to buying and supporting high-cost enterprise storage solutions because of its "use what you want and pay for what you use" approach, said Milton Weatherhead, federal program manager at HP.

The suite aims to provide flexible storage solutions — onsite or remote — to meet high-growth, storage-intensive environments. Enterprise storage becomes like a "utility" that is operated, maintained and upgraded by a service provider, said Mac Oxford, vice president for strategic development within standard systems at Litton PRC.

Oxford and Weatherhead said any agency with medium to large data centers is a target customer. The first government contract will be announced shortly, they said.

"In fact, we've already started acquiring hardware for this installation because we're confident enough about closing it," Oxford said. "Some is on order and some has already arrived, and data is being migrated."

Agencies will pay according to what they use and how stringent their storage demands are, but planning is the key to keeping costs low, said Bill Adolfson, product manager for SODS at PRC. "It's like cable TV: If you want a premium channel, you just call up and the extra capacity will be available."

GSA pricing for the base configuration is $33 per gigabyte, Adolfson said.

Litton PRC, a subsidiary of Litton Industries, and HP have been partners in the federal space for more than 10 years. As part of this long-term relationship, Litton PRC recently added the complete line of HP Unix products to its GSA IT schedule.