HP Wins $50 Million IRS Contract for Servers, Storage

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard announced last week that one of its big resellers in the government market, PlanetGov, has secured a deal to upgrade and modernize the Web, print, and file server infrastructure at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service for $50 million.

The deal spans the next four years, and during that time, HP and PlanetGov will unplug the existing 4,400 servers installed by IBM Corp and Dell and the 30 separate storage area networks. Exactly how much of that displaced iron has IBM or Dell brands was unclear at press time, but Bruce Klein, vice president of HP's federal sales unit inside the Enterprise Systems Group says that in the infrastructure and desktop tiers, the IRS was essentially a Dell shop. The IRS uses a mix of IBM mainframes and Sun Microsystems Unix boxes to its back office processing systems, which handle personal and corporate tax payments and receipts for the U.S. government.

Almost exactly a year ago, HP and PlanetGov, which is based in the Washington suburb of Chantilly, Virginia, secured a $100 million, three year deal to update the government agency's 30,000 desktop and laptop computers, kicking Dell out of the site. PlanetGov, which has $300 million in annual sales, has obviously worked very hard on that desktop deal with HP, and the two have been gunning for a slice of the server biz at the IRS since then.

Now, says Klein, HP will begin turning the IRS's attention to its mainframes and Unix boxes. The agency is apparently looking at Superdome Integrity machines now, in fact. Whether the installed mainframes and Unix boxes are actually in play or if the IRS is just tire kicking is unclear. It would be very tough to port the IRS's applications from the mainframe to any Unix or Windows platform, but the Solaris machines would be a relatively easy port to HP-UX, and a somewhat tougher port to Windows.

Under the deal, HP will provide a mix of two-way DL380 eight-way DL740 rack-mounted ProLiant Xeon servers, four-way ML570 tower servers, and two-way and four-way ProLiant BL p-Class blade servers for the IRS to run its Windows workloads. These machines will support Microsoft Corp's Exchange Server groupware and messaging software as well. Some of the machines will support VMware's virtual machine partitioning software, which will facilitate the consolidation of workloads from 4,400 separate IBM and Dell machines down to 3,000 HP machines. On the SAN front, the IRS will be choosing a mix of entry MSA 1000 arrays, midrange EVA 3000 arrays, and high-end EVA 5000 arrays.

Sponsored By ACUCORP

Acucorp is a leading developer of application extension solutions running on over 600 platforms such as Linux. These extend5 solutions include a powerful ANSI COBOL compiler, an integrated development environment, web deployment technology, seamless interfaces to RDBMS, COBOL-based GUI development, distributed processing and client/server technology. For more information, visit www.acucorp.com