The US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service has awarded Unisys a contract to migrate the agency’s data centre to the USDA’s new consolidated Enterprise Data Centres (EDCs). The fixed-price contract, valued at approximately US$5.5 million over a two-year period, is part of a USDA initiative to streamline IT management, reduce costs and address IT security vulnerabilities by consolidating the department’s data centres into four EDC locations.

Unisys (NYSE: UIS) will plan, execute and manage the migration of critical FSIS applications, servers and storage network hardware from multiple locations to the USDA EDC and set up a disaster recovery environment at another USDA EDC site. FSIS is responsible for ensuring that the nation’s commercial supply of meat, poultry and processed egg products is safe and correctly labeled and packaged. FSIS is leveraging Unisys support and data centre migration expertise to help achieve an efficient transition of its IT systems.

“Uninterrupted availability of FSIS’ mission-critical applications is essential to the USDA’s ability to fulfill its mission to ensure the safety and security of our food supply,” said Eugene Zapfel, lead partner responsible for USDA, Unisys Federal Systems. “Unisys expertise in data centre migrations, demonstrated in similar projects with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and other public and private sector organisations, will assist the FSIS in its vital mission of protecting our nation’s food supply.”