US House of Representatives Looking For Data Center

The US House of Representatives is shopping for a new data center. The House issued a request for proposal for data center space outside the Washington, D.C., metro. The RFP is for colocation that can support day-to-day operations for multiple agencies as well as disaster recovery and business continuity.

The proposal is for potentially six years with operations contract due November 25. The facility needs to be 300 to 350 miles as the crow flies from Capitol Hill, 100 miles from the coastline and within 100 miles of the nearest military facility. Think areas like Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbus, Ohio, or Albany, New York.

The RFP includes a hot aisle containment requirement. The data center needs to provide a secure cage for a handful of individual agencies. The request also calls for outside space to install a 5 meter dish satellite antenna and space for government office trailers -- potentially one per agency -- and room for about six 800 square foot trailers.

The service level agreement required is typical, looking for 100 percent uptime with graduated penalties for dropping below five nines. Rack power needs to be between 5 kW and 20 kW. Environmental monitoring of the data center and critical infrastructure is also required.

Agencies are trying to cut costs and consolidate while trying to maintain reliability. The government data center consolidation initiave has been going on since 2010, and the latest progress report on the effort was issued last month.

This RFP is one example of the government looking to multi-tenant data centers to consolidate operations of multiple agencies into one facility. A recent survey revealed IT workers were not confident in government data center reliability.

The agencies named in the RFP include the Library of Congress, Architect of the Capitol, U.S. Capitol Police, Congressional Budget Office, Government Accountability Office, Government Printing Office, and other supportive agencies of the Legislative Branch.

The Social Security Administration opened up a brand new data center last month.