NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The I3P Program was established to transform the NASA information technology infrastructure from a Center-based delivery model to an Enterprise-based  and managed approach in an effort to better-enable the mission, improve IT security, and gain efficiencies.    The NEDC procurement represented one element of this overall strategy.

In February 2010, OMB issued the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative which required agencies to report extensive amounts of information about data center inventories and assets and to make commitments to reduce the inventory of data centers through consolidation, virtualization and moving applications to cloud computing.  In December 2010, OMB issued the “25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management” that further reinforced the data consolidation mandate and also established a “Cloud First” policy.  These initiatives required NASA to engage in an intense process of due diligence that involved:

• Manually revalidating the inventory of data centers and server rooms across NASA
• Deploying a tool to perform automated inventory of data center assets, applications and asset utilization
• Conducting site visits and evaluating all NASA data centers for condition, utilization and energy efficiency
• Deploying energy metering to all data centers

The knowledge gained from the due diligence process led NASA to revise its data center strategy from the NEDC approach of a single consolidated data center for the agency to a set of regional data centers (one or more key data centers at each NASA center) and to approach the consolidation from a regional (center) perspective, not an Agency perspective.  At this time, all NASA Centers have defined plans for consolidating data centers and eliminating server rooms and are executing those plans within the scope of their existing Center support contracts.

Further, the rapid pace with which cloud computing is maturing leads us to understand that NASA will have significantly reduced requirements for data centers in the future, as we increasingly leverage cloud computing capabilities.

At this time, NASA has no need to acquire access to a single enterprise data center (nor any additional data centers anywhere else, due to the existing inventory of data centers currently available).  NASA has no need to acquire dedicated data center consolidation services because consolidation issues and actions are being executed by Center personnel through their existing support contractors.   Therefore, NASA is cancelling the NEDC procurement.