BYTEGRID® has been selected by Lockheed Martin to provide a data center for an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract awarded to Lockheed Martin by the Department of Labor (DOL).

The seven-year IDIQ contract calls for the initial transition and relocation of DOL metropolitan Washington, D.C. data centers into BYTEGRID’s ultra-secure, financial grade facility in Montgomery County, MD. The overall plans include a sequential move of data centers to BYTEGRID and to the cloud.

“The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative requires premium data centers able to meet the most stringent requirements for security, reliability, uptime, and compliance,” said Lynn Singleton, director of Environmental Services at Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions. “BYTEGRID’s secure, FISMA-compliant facility met all contractual requirements, enabling our team to support DOL’s mission needs.”

The contract supports the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). With the goal of saving $2.4 billion, the FDCCI aims to eliminate and/or consolidate 1,186 federal data centers by 2015, according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The initiative and consolidation activity is tied to other industry trends including server virtualization, cloud computing and energy efficiency.

To meet current and future needs, the DOL selected the Lockheed Martin/BYTEGRID team for their abilities to provide a secure, reliable National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliant data center with best practice operations for data center collocation, infrastructure and support services. These services will allow DOL agencies the flexibility to grow and meet future functional needs with scalable dynamic computing capabilities such as managed hosting and cloud service technologies.

“The FDCCI is an initiative of significant national importance and unique opportunity for Maryland companies,” said Don Goodwin, BYTEGRID’s executive vice president, sales & marketing. “We are pleased to provide the critical data center infrastructure and innovative in-center cloud bursting, meeting all key government standards for security compliance.”

Strategically located within the metro Washington, D.C. data center market, BYTEGRID’s facility is the largest multi-tenant data center in Maryland featuring 214,000 sq ft of data center space and over 90,000 sq ft of raised floor. It features new redundant power supply systems, providing a total of 9 megawatts (MW) of critical load power, 22 MW of on-site power generation and cooling that exceeds requirements for concurrent maintainability and fault tolerance, with future planned expansions to double critical load power capacity.

The carrier-neutral facility is served by multiple telecommunications providers across diverse, redundant paths and is efficiently designed to provide BYTEGRID’s tenants an extremely competitive total cost of ownership.

To protect its customers’ mission-critical applications and data, BYTEGRID’s physical security meets NIST FISMA, and GSA Interagency Security Committee standards and network grid connectivity criteria. The 11-acre campus is entirely gated and integrates a full range of 24/7 physical and logical security features ranging from ballistic rated entrances and checkpoints to biometric registration and authorization systems.