DIA makes fast-tracked data center maintenance award to avoid ‘eventual equipment failure’
The Defense Intelligence Agency was authorized to rapidly purchase preventative maintenance, replacement parts, and software for the power and cooling infrastructure that runs its data centers worldwide, according to redacted contracting materials released Wednesday.
A new justification and approval notice reveals the government moved quickly to make this award for an undisclosed amount to Schneider Electric Federal “to avoid a lapse in service for DIA.”
“If DIA’s data centers were to fail, they would be unable to produce, analyze and disseminate military intelligence information devastatingly impacting both combat and non-combat military missions worldwide,” officials wrote.
Broadly, the agency’s arsenal of data centers that span the globe houses computational hardware and storage assets that enable personnel to capture and analyze a wide range of intelligence on foreign militaries.
Schneider Electric Federal’s equipment and software services will provide “cooling ventilation and regulated electrical power to critical signal networking, data storage, and computational equipment as well as environmental and video monitoring that support command [and] control and analytic systems, for DIA and its customers,” the J&A document states.
This contract follow-on from a 2021 deal that was valued at more than $29 million, will run from Sept.23, 2026, to Sept. 22, 2027. The dollar value of the new award was redacted in the J&A document.
Officials in the contracting documents warned that if the award was not approved, DIA would “experience an immediate lapse in critical preventative maintenance and warranty” for its core data center infrastructure.
“In the absence of preventative maintenance and warranty the operational effectiveness of the Schneider Electric [American Power Conversion] equipment will degrade through normal use resulting in an ever increasing risk of poor operational performance, eventual equipment failure causing data center service hazardous condition (HAZCON) operation and potential service interruptions to DIA and its customers,” they wrote.
The officials indicated that Schneider Electric Federal holds exclusive proprietary rights to the hardware, diagnostic software, system firmware, and engineering schematics needed to service DIA’s data center infrastructure.
The agency will continue to assess the lifecycle of the current Schneider Electric infrastructure in the near term.
“When the equipment reaches its end-of-life and requires replacement, the government will look for opportunities to competitively procure new equipment with open-architecture or increased interoperability standards that do not lock the agency into a single-source [original equipment manufacturer] maintenance model,” officials wrote in the J&A document.
Schneider Electric Federal did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
