The National Institutes of Health has chosen FDC Technologies Inc. Bethesda Md. for a $55 million contract to upgrade and replace mainframes for the agency.
The award made in mid-December is the second of four procurements planned under Project CERTAN (Computer Equipment Resources and Technology Acquisition for NIH) a program worth about $400 million to update the agency's scientific and administrative systems. The first award for CERTAN Information Technology Support Services went to SRA International Inc. and Science Applications International Corp. in November.
CERTAN Corporate Computing is the fourth major contract or subcontract that NIH has bestowed on FDC Technologies in the past two years. The company also supplies equipment and services to the agency through the Electronic Computer Store ImageWorld and Chief Information Officer Solutions and Partners (CIO-SP) programs.
The equipment primarily will support administrative and database applications for NIH's Division of Computer Research and Technology (DCRT) and mirror-image backup for the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center Bethesda. In addition NIH plans to provide data processing services to other Department of Health and Human Services agencies that are closing their data centers under an Office of Management and Budget directive to merge such operations.
So far HHS has decided that mainframe processing performed by its Information Technology Service Rockville Md. (formerly Parklawn Computer Center) will be taken over by DCRT. The future of other HHS data centers has yet to be determined.
The consolidation plan also allows the NIH Computer Center to provide up to one-fourth of its available capacity to other agencies said John Dickson chief of high-performance scientific computing at DCRT. "The result of that is we will not buy the absolute lowest level that the contract allows but we will buy a higher level" of processing capacity he said.
DCRT plans to use the contract to migrate its mainframe applications from proprietary IBM Corp. MVS- and VM-based systems to an open-systems environment although the agency expects to maintain the legacy operating systems for users who need them. FDC Technologies will provide IBM mainframes to replace older machines which include three IBM 3090s and two ES/9000s. The new mainframe models will run a Posix-compliant operating system capable of running Unix MVS and VM applications.
Dickson said DCRT will not directly replace the existing systems but will base its purchases on capacity requirements.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
