Veterans agency looks beyond EMC for multi-million storage deal

With a 75-year retention requirement and 5 petabytes of data, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs faces major challenges when it comes to storing data in its primary data center in Austin, Texas.

Now the VA is taking on another challenge: Migrating from an all-EMC solution to a multi-vendor storage system that uses different devices depending on how quickly data needs to be recovered.

The VA has awarded a $10 million contract to Vion, a storage systems integrator that will provide Hitachi Data Systems  products capable of storing 2 petabytes of data. Vion, a midsize reseller that is veteran-owned, beat out EMC for the one-year hardware and services contract.

"We have a combination of medical records and beneficiary records that could be called back up for consultations by physicians involved in a legal case," explains John Rucker, acting executive director of corporate data center operations for VA's Austin Information Technology Center. "We do have a lengthy storage requirement."

Winning this deal, which was actually awarded through a small disabled veteran-owned firm called Alvarez and Associates, is a major coup for Vion, one of Hitachi's largest resellers.

"VA was a 10-year installed EMC customer. Any time we can unseat EMC is a significant win for Vion," says Bob Bruce, vice president of federal sales with Vion. "The VA is in growth mode due to the visibility of the veteran community and given the world situation. It think this award speaks well of the Hitachi product line."

Bruce adds that the VA award is "one of the five biggest deals we have done this year."

"EMC remains a key information infrastructure partner for the VA,'' said EMC spokesman Rick Lacroix in a statement to Network World. "It is not at all unusual for EMC storage systems to be deployed in heterogeneous environments. We are a key supporter of various open standards that allow EMC systems to fully function in heterogeneous server, storage and networking environments and with various types of management software.''

The last time the VA awarded a multi-million dollar storage deal was in 2002, and the award went to EMC. Since then, EMC has dominated the storage environment in VA's main data center in Austin as well as its backup data centers in Philadelphia and Chicago.

"We purchased the EMC Symmetrix systems for disaster recovery and continuity of operations," Rucker says. "It was a reaction in part to 9/11. Up until that time, we were a tape recovery set-up. After 9/11, we realized we needed another solution if people couldn't get on planes and fly tapes to Chicago or Philadelphia."

Now the VA is switching from a single-vendor to a multi-vendor approach, and it's facing the pros and cons of that decision. On the one hand, the agency is glad that it won't be reliant on one company for its mission-critical data storage.

"We won't be tied to any one particular vendor or any one particular technology," Rucker says. "Let's say EMC came up with a leapfrog technology over Hitachi. We're positioned where we can fit that into the mix."