CTERA announced that Peraton, the world's leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, has selected CTERA's file platform to support a $497 million contract to provide infrastructure-as-a-managed service (laaMS) for U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) storage and computing infrastructure facilities across the U.S. and globally.

Under the contract CTERA, which provides the only global file system included on the Department of Defense Information Network (DoDIN) Approved Products List (APL), will deliver file services for mission-critical workloads, connecting up to 300 distributed sites to the VA Enterprise Cloud powered by AWS GovCloud (US).

The solution design is based on centrally managed CTERA Edge Filers deployed over on-premises hyperconverged infrastructure, enabling the consolidation of VA's legacy network-attached systems (NAS) and eliminating application-specific infrastructure silos. All data is securely replicated to AWS GovCloud (US), with special added support from CTERA for AWS Snowball to facilitate efficient bulk data transfer.

"CTERA offers a proven solution for unstructured data management challenges at the Federal level," said Eric Watson, Senior Program Manager, Peraton. "By enabling VA to embark on an edge-to-cloud file services strategy without compromising on highly stringent data security requirements, CTERA represents the ideal modern file storage component of the IaaMS contract." 

"Federal agencies are consolidating aging systems and transitioning to consumption-based cloud storage using industry best practices," said Sandy Carter, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for Amazon Web Services (AWS). "AWS and our Partners are helping the VA and the Public Sector at large extract value from their unstructured data once in the cloud without impacting its security posture."

"Legacy data center NAS infrastructure lacks native cloud support and cannot meet the scale and elasticity requirements of modern data workloads," said Emil Velasquez, CTERA Vice President for Federal Sales. "Being selected by Peraton to support the VA's modernization is a testament to the strong relevance of global file systems for public sector agencies, and further supports CTERA's standing as the undisputed leader of the 2021 GigaOm Radar for Distributed Cloud File Storage."

IaaMS will support up to 220+ petabytes of VA's mission critical data, ranging from business operations data to the medical images used in veteran care. Additionally, IaaMS will enable VA to create a standardized service delivery model that eliminates application-specific infrastructure silos, leverages cloud-based storage capabilities, and implements industry best practices for storage.