The National Information Technology Center (NITC) has been at the center of every major workload consolidation within the Department of Agriculture for the past 16 years. Collectively, our staff has more than 200 years of experience in computer systems migration work, most of it earned on NITC data center consolidation projects.

In 1988, the NITC built a conversion system image of the workload of the Washington Computer Center and successfully cut over the operation on a weekend. This project saved USDA from $30 to $40 million over five years.

In 1991, consolidation of a Unisys workload from the Fort Collins Computer Center progressed over an 18-month period. Activity involved creation of a mirror image and migration, then conversion, of 2.5 million lines of Unisys application code to the NITC IBM environment. This effort saved customer agencies approximately $33.4 million over the following 4 years.

Again in the early 1990's, NITC used the mirror image approach to migrate electronic mail and switched voice services of its own and its customers from Sprint to AT&T. NITC designed and implemented a dual network architecture, which ran in parallel for 18 months until all customers were migrated successfully.

During 1991-92, NITC managed a conversion project, which moved a production processing workload for several customers from the Honeywell to the IBM environment. Savings realized from this move were estimated at $1 million annually.

In May of 1997, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) awarded an outsourcing multiyear contract for the Integrated Computing Environment - Mainframe and Network (ICE-MAN) workload to NITC. ICE-MAN encompasses essential administrative functions for the FAA, including personnel, financial, and aviation safety information systems. Using a very aggressive project management approach, FAA and NITC worked together from July through November and over a long weekend successfully relocated the ICE-MAN operation to NITC from the previous contractor site.

During 2002-03, NITC successfully migrated from mainframe to midrange open system and migrated financial database warehouses.

In June of 2003, the NITC successfully migrated the Farm Services Agency's (FSA) WebFarm to the Data Center in Kansas City, MO. The FSA's WebFarm consisted of 120 midrange servers using MS Windows operating system, tape library, tape backup equipment, routers, switches, and associated hardware. The migration was completed in two (2) weeks and fully operational.

Lessons learned in these efforts were considerable. Drawing upon this experience, the NITC can accomplish a partial or total relocation of workload with a proven record for managing all aspects of the project. Some areas where significant cost savings can be realized in your organization include the following:

• Physical infrastructure (maintenance of raised floor space, uninterruptible power source components). We have a 24x7x365+ environments for customers' mid-range platforms.
• Investment and maintenance costs for hardware, software, and telecommunications connections at the mainframe.
• Personnel costs.

Additional benefits include license leveraging, centralized technical support, feasibility to contract for offsite processing, potential for a greater selection of software, and an improved environment for data sharing.

http://www.ocio.usda.gov/nitc/migration.html