DOJ Considers Reorganizing Its Storage

"The objective of this initiative is to provide a common set of storage solutions that can be leveraged by all components, while driving down cost for products based on the size of the department," the RFI said.

The DOJ primarily wants to use off-the-shelf storage products, the RFI said. The agency also is willing to continue to utilize existing infrastructure as much as possible in moving to the new model.

One analyst who watches the federal government IT sector closely said hes a little skeptical about the plan, given that similar federal initiatives in the past have crashed and burned due to the sheer weight and breadth of their needs.

"Its good that the DOJ wants to bring their system into the 20th—let alone the 21st—century," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT, in Hayward, Calif. "But I remember only a few years ago when the federal government came out and said it wanted to enable all of its databases to talk to each other—across all departments and divisions. Nice idea, but ...

"They spent about a quarter of a billion dollars trying to get the thing off the ground and eventually threw up their hands in frustration, because it was never going to work."

It makes perfect, sense, King said, for the DOJ storage system to be revamped and coordinated into a centralized architecture.

"It would be a lot more cost- and labor-efficient to have common storage that could be managed centrally. Theyll need centralized tools, and so theyre going to need a large vendor to take the lead on this. Smaller vendors who dont have the wide range of tools and hardware wont work in this instance," King said.

A project like this could easily take three to five years to get moving, King said.

"If it goes beyond five years, then it will get bogged down and never work," he said.

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.