American public sector IT specialist Colsa Corporation has won a contract for maintenance and support of NASA’s National Center for Critical Information Processing and Storage (NCCIPS) in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

The contract could be worth as much as $107 million over the next seven years.

The NCCIPS facility is a federal shared services data center, which means its resources are available not just to NASA, but also other federal government agencies.

Making sure rockets fly

Rocket engine testing at Stennis Space Center
Rocket engine testing at Stennis Space Center – NASA

Colsa, headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, offers IT services to a number of government customers including the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Justice.

The company has been contracted to support the NCCIPS, a 200,000 square foot facility situated on a 64-acre campus within NASA Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi. The data center offers colocation “at a Tier III level” with 32MVA of power capacity, backed by generators and UPS systems.

It deals with nationally sensitive, critical, and classified data, and is managed by the NASA Shared Services Center (NSSC). The facility is involved in the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) - an effort to to consolidate the sprawling mass of data centers used by the federal government into a more managable, fiscally responsible number.

Colsa’s contract is actually the second version of the deal - the facility was previously maintained by Science Applications International Corp.

Under the terms of the contract, Colsa will be responsible for secure facility operations, maintenance, management, environmental analysis, energy management, information technology, system power, and network integration.