DFAS - Overview

Introduction:

Thundercat has teamed with Booz Allen Hamilton to provide a Defense agency Primary, secondary and tertiary storage to support over 9,000 employees. The contract also included designing a resilient Disaster Recovery/Coop infrastructure. The award extends to 12/2014, and is valued at $30,000,000.

DFAS Case Study

Since 2005 ThunderCat Technology has been tasked with providing the design, implementation and operation of the storage, data backup and Disaster Recovery/COOP systems for the Nation’s largest Defense Accounting organization. ThunderCat is a subcontractor for Storage design, implementation and operation under Booz, Allen, Hamilton (Prime Contractor).

The customer’s network, consisting of 32 individual sites and over 16,000 users’ worldwide was redesigned and upgraded to provide increased capabilities and ease of use for the production users, while at the same time greatly increasing the overall systems reliability and disaster recovery capabilities. The redesign of the network was based on information gathered from on site assessments at the various locations and evaluations of the existing systems and workflow requirements of the various sites. Using this information as a baseline, ThunderCat developed an enterprise wide storage, backup and disaster recovery solution. The solution was designed to meet the customer objectives of increasing reliability and disaster recovery capabilities, while reducing the costs of administration and maintenance.

The network as redesigned by ThunderCat migrated all of the data at each site to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices that provide hardware redundancy combined with integrated software that automatically backs up each sites’ data multiple times per day to disk. Each sites data replicates back to disk at one of two remote primary sites, where it is also backed up to tape each day utilizing an enterprise class tape library. Tape backups at the primary sites are sent off site on a regularly scheduled basis for archival and disaster recovery purposes. In addition, each of the two primary sites replicates all of its data, including the data from its attendant remote sites, to the other primary site multiple times per day. In the event of a failure or disaster at a remote site users can still access their data from their associated primary site. In the event of a primary site failure or disaster users are redirected to the other primary site where all their data is replicated and they can continue to work from the alternate primary site.

The redesign of the network included technology updates and server consolidation for many of the existing systems and deployment of many new systems. As part of the system redesign and consolidation, and in support of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) initiative, several sites systems and services were migrated to other sites and data centers. These data center migrations required extensive planning, testing and coordination to transition the systems without impact to the user community.

In 2009, Booz Allen was awarded the re-competed contract with Thundercat as the sub-contractor to provide on-going improvements and infrastructure upgrades. This new contract runs through 12/2014.

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