|
Carrier Services
Veterans Affairs gets on the MPLS train
Begins GSA Networx Universal transition with AT&T and Qwest
by Sean Buckley
The General Services Administration’s (GSA) Networx Universal communications procurement contract may be the talk of the town in the public sector, but technology transformation and convergence is nothing new to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affair’s IT department.
As the second largest U.S. government Cabinet department — one that handles the provisioning of benefits to more than 74.5 million veterans — the agency has a diverse set of needs.
At the same time, the VA’s IT department has gone through a major restructuring.
“Prior to the reorganization, we were a silo organization and everyone did their own thing and sometimes it was in lock step by chance, but for the most part it wasn’t entirely in lock step,” explained Charles De Sanno, the Department of Veterans Affair’s (VA) executive director of Enterprise Technology and Engineering Infrastructure (within the Office of Information & Technology). “In an agency as large as ours and as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) now comes out with guidance on IT resources going to CIO, it’s important that the CIO has a strategic direction to this entire infrastructure with everything being standardized and converged.”
Now, the VA is in the process of making yet another major move with its own internal network.
In late 2008, the VA awarded two WAN data networking contracts to AT&T ($120 million) and Qwest ($60 million) under the GSA’s Networx Universal communications procurement program. (see Figure 1.)
Under these agreements, AT&T will serve as the primary provider, while Qwest will serve as the secondary data networking provider to build out a nationwide MPLS network to connect the VA facilities onto a common backbone. (see AT&T Government Solutions comes back fighting and Five Carriers Get GSA ‘Hunting Licenses’)
VA will effectively migrate off the existing Federal Telecommunications Services (FTS) 2001, a contract where Sprint was the primary data networking provider.
And while DeSanno is aware of the challenges in migrating from one service provider to another — something the agency previously went through when they migrated from FTS-2000 to the FTS-2001 contract — he sees the network as an enabler.
“We need to ensure that the network is resilient and make sure that the speeds and feeds are available for the coming period of time of five to 10 years out to meet all of our business challenges,” he said. “Simply put, the network is part of a master strategy.”
The starting gate
With AT&T and Qwest firmly established as its WAN providers of choice, the VA is currently in the design stage.
First on the VA’s to-do list in this design stage is to migrate off of the FTS-2001 contract and onto Networx.
Of course, the time to migrate to Networx is ticking. This looming deadline means the VA’s IT department can’t engineer the new implementation as extensively as they would like to.
Given the pace of technology change, DeSanno said that he has enough flexibility built into his transition plan to address other needs as they arise.
“Our goal is to meet the deadline regarding conversion and getting off of FTS-2001 and doing like-for-like network system replacement,” he said. “But I have instructed my staff that wherever we have new applications such as imaging and tele-radiology and our regional processing initiative where we are collapsing data centers and providing a robust telecommunications network, we are going to do it.”
A major challenge the VA has with moving to the new network is determining the business requirements across each of the agency’s 21 locations or Veterans Integrated Services Networks (VISNs).
While the VA does have a centralized IT group, it runs a decentralized business with each VISN having its own specific needs.
“If you go out to each of these business units, they each are trying to do business and skin the cat the best they can,” DeSanno said. “We have IT people that report to us, but the business needs are slightly different so the question is how do you architect a solution that takes all this variability into account?”
Still, DeSanno is optimistic the Networx vehicle and the IP-enabled WAN networks from AT&T and Qwest will allow it to achieve two goals.
First, they will enable it to meet the ever-changing business needs of each of the VA’s VISNs, while working with these units in understanding the standard way they do business.
“If you go to the Blockbuster store, the systems are known, they have the same software and you know what the feeds and speeds need to be,” DeSanno said. “Come to a VA medical center and each one of them has different needs so it’s difficult to reengineer something like this from the beginning and not slow down, but that’s our goal: to standardize, consolidate and converge.”
Downtime is not an option
Regardless of the new network infrastructure being built in this latest deployment, the new network can’t effect existing operations at each VISN.
At one level, the VA will run both AT&T and then Qwest into critical sites as backup.
Delivering MPLS-based services to the VA is not entirely new to AT&T. In early 2007, the VA awarded the service provider a $17.2 million contract under the GSA’s FTS-2001 Long Distance Crossover program to provide the agency with MPLS Private Network Transport Service.
In other words, downtime is not an option.
“You have to remember that VA’s environment is if they have a veteran who’s laying on an operating table and they have a network issue, that’s how they equate this: a T1 could be someone’s life on the line if that T1 happens to go down,” said Quinten R. Johnson, Executive Director – Government, AT&T Government Solutions.
Application uptime is essential to the VA.
In assessing how to engineer the new MPLS network, AT&T found that in one VA region, the network was suffering latency issues. It turned out that the way its virus protection software was configured was making the network run slowly.
Because of the agency’s diverse business needs, any changes need to take into account the potential affect on any business unit’s current applications.
For instance, each of the VA medical centers depends on their Vista health care applications;the IT department would not want the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) to prevent a payment going out to a veteran on time.
“A lot of thought is going into this and we don’t want to over-engineer it or over-finesse it,” DeSanno said. “We want to bite off as much as we can chew and ensure integrity throughout and then gradually implement the controls, functionality and enhancements that we desire over time.”
Having gone through a major IT network transformation to FTS-2001 with Sprint, DeSanno says it wants to be prepared to deal with unforeseen anomalies in the upgrade process.
“There was a lesson learned with Sprint, but it could have been any vendor,” he said. “When the VA migrated to FTS-2001, we flooded Sprint, but there’s only so much they could have done. All of those lessons learned regarding planning and execution and plan B type of work is very, very important.”
And while the VA never had any issues with the stability of Sprint’s ATM and Frame Relay-based services, any interruption in migrating to the new MPLS network will be noticed.
However, the MPLS network will provide the VA with benefits the legacy network could never have dreamed of. Unlike the current FR and ATM network which had worked well for the current sets of applications, the MPLS network will enable it to consolidate network infrastructure (data centers) in addition to extending new services such as remote monitoring of VA patients.
“As time goes on and the demand from the business regarding just-in-time computing and cloud computing along with ubiquitous types of delivery of applications goes up, we need an architecture and environment that provides that solution,” DeSanno said. “I am looking forward to this infrastructure which will be more resilient, cheaper, and allow us to meet the needs of the business in a better fashion.”
|
