U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Data Centers/IT Infrastructure
Cloud
VAEC
Google Cloud
In January 2022, the VA Signed a $13M contract with Google Cloud for API Management
Apigee
Will be used to create new tools and applications to improve veteran access to VA services & data
Part of a greater Lighthouse API Program, aimed to provide developers with secure digital access to VA APIs to develop new tools and services
Apigee provides a full lifecycle API management platform
Cloud Migration
Microsoft Teams
Over the course of the COVID Pandemic, the VA migrated from legacy Skype infrastructure to Microsoft Teams
The VA now plans on shifting a third of their major applications by 2024
VA Platform One
A platform designed by the VA's enterprise Cloud Ops team to standardize the method for the VA to containerize applications and use microservices
One of the long term aims is to integrate AIOps
Pivot's away from AWS, Azure & iCloud
Dave Catanoso, Director, Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office
“We actually pivoted from a legacy of Skype infrastructure capability to Microsoft Teams in the middle of the COVID pandemic, It was probably one of the largest migrations of anyone to Teams ever. We did it during the pandemic. And it’s worked great.”
Key Applications
Caseflow Appeals
FasterCare
API Management Platform
VA.gov.
Failure to meet Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) data consolidation goals in 2018
In 2018, the VA closed 32 Data Centers, which was below their own target of 85 & the Office of Management & Budgets target of 130
U.S. Gov't expected $85m in savings; achieved $4m
Also behind schedule in rolling out energy metering software
Generally received high Grades on FITARA scorecard, however they received an F in data center optimization
Peraton
VA have awarded Peraton an IT Infrastructure contract worth up to $497m over 7 years (from 2021)
Peraton provide a Infrastructure as a managed service
Will integrate on-premise infrastructure with the VAEC
Enable a standardized service delivery model
George Rollins, VP of VA and Defense Health
"Peraton is uniquely positioned to deliver next-generation storage capability and services to the VA and the veterans who have proudly served our country,"
Will support storage & computing, handling up to 220 petabytes
Eliminates application specific infrastructure silos
Still working to consolidate regional centers (January 2022)
the VA has seven core data centers, which act as the hub of their enterprise. When they close a regional center they prefer to move that workload onto the cloud, and if not possible they move to one of their core data centers
Edge computing is an evolving process
Reggie Cummings, Executive Director of Infrastructure Operations , Office of Information Technology, Operations and Services
“That’s kind of our focus. It’s to shore up those areas in terms of consolidation, because we also have a number of regional data centers that service a lot of our clinical regional requirements,”
Zenoss Inc
In 2017, Zenoss announced that the VA had selected Zenoss to provide holistic health and performance insights for both hardware and software within the Cyber Security Hosted Services managed OCS enclaves
Lumen
In 2020, Lumen won 2 15 year contracts with the VA.
$721m National Local Exchange Carrier Next Generation Contract
$195m Data and WAN Carrier Contract
IBM
In 2013, IBM signed a 10 year deal with the VA to upgrade their HR system
Splunk
SAP
Nutanix
VMware
vsphere
Red Hat
Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL)
Splunk Enterprise
SAP Control Center
Acropolis Operating System