State plans to seek help for data center consolidation

The State Department plans to hire a contractor to support its program to consolidate its data centers, 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 an existing contract that includes a set-aside pool of 20 contractors. The existing contract is named State’s Hybrid Information Technology Services for State.

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.