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The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded Unisys a $5.5 million contract to migrate a portion of the department’s data center to its new consolidated enterprise data centers (EDC) over the next two years.

Unisys will relocate critical Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) applications, servers and storage network hardware from multiple locations to one USDA enterprise data center location. FSIS is the department within the USDA responsible for correctly checking, packaging and labeling the nation’s commercial supply of meat, poultry and processed egg products.

Unisys also will set up a disaster recovery environment at another USDA EDC site, according to the company.

In the first phase of the project, Unisys will analyze the FSIS’ existing data center environment and prepare a migration plan. Then the company will assist in preparing servers, mapping applications to servers and managing the new center until it performs and provides information in accordance with the existing data center, according to Unisys.

“Uninterrupted availability of FSIS’ mission-critical applications is essential to the USDA’s ability to fulfill its mission to ensure the safety and security of our food supply,” said Eugene Zapfel, lead partner responsible for USDA, Unisys Federal Systems. He compared the USDA project to similar data migrations that Unisys assisted with, such as that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The firm fixed-price contract is part of a USDA initiative to streamline IT management, reduce costs and address IT security vulnerabilities by consolidating the department’s data centers into four EDC locations.