Lead Storage/Backup SME

Empower AI is AI for government. Empower AI gives federal agency leaders the tools to elevate the potential of their workforce with a direct path for meaningful transformation. Headquartered in Reston, Va., Empower AI leverages three decades of experience solving complex challenges in Health, Defense, and Civilian missions. Our proven Empower AI Platform® provides a practical, sustainable path for clients to achieve transformation that is true to who they are, what they do, how they work, with the resources they have. The result is a government workforce that is exponentially more creative and productive. For more information, visit www.Empower.ai.

Empower AI is proud to be recognized as a 2022 Military Friendly Employer by Viqtory, the publisher of G.I. Jobs. This designation reflects the company’s commitment to hiring and supporting active-duty and veteran employees.

Empower AI: As the Lead Storage/Backup SME, you will be a key member of the Empower AI team providing support to the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Joint Service Provider (JSP) on the Platform Services contract. JSP operates and defends the Department of Defense’s (DOD) key cyber terrain and provides information technology (IT) services to Pentagon and National Capital Region (NCR) customers. For Platform Services, Empower AI will provide an integrated, structured approach to operating, managing, and maintaining the JSP-supported infrastructure across all managed platforms, as well as assist in defining requirements for future upgrades and enhancements based on operational and customer trends. We will provide a unified approach to managing server, storage, and application resources (to include virtualized applications) at an enterprise level. In order to drive standardization in the hosting environment, Empower AI will assist customers, both external and internal, by moving applications to the JSP IT environments. This will allow JSP to offer services and infrastructure to customers via a Platform as a Service model, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, Desktop as a Service (DaaS) model, or at minimum, limit application deployments only to standardized servers.

Highlights of Responsibilities:

• Provide management of overall Storage and Backup operations in direct coordination with the Operations Manager and Government Leadership.
• Provide enterprise storage services for JSP and customer supported applications. Maintain a data availability of 99.95% for enterprise applications and replicated data. Maintain a data availability of 98.8% for non-replicated data. Provide operations, maintenance, implementation, management services, and failover integration and support.
• provide on-going maintenance services that are comprehensive and integrated across functional technical areas of the JNOSC, which includes data storage, data storage transport failover software, servers and blade servers, hyper-converged platforms, backup and recovery, and effectively utilizing vendor maintenance contracts.
• Support a complex and multi-environment storage solution (on-premises, alternate site, hybrid-cloud environment) and shall provide migration support for the relocation of on-premises storage to a future state environment as required.
• Provide life cycle management and support of the JSP-managed storage environment, inclusive of O&M, decommission, software upgrades, migrations to new storage hardware platforms and cloud hosting environments, storage rationalization, and disaster recovery.
• Develop a plan to execute major software version upgrades of the tools and software maintained by the vendor and obtain government approval of the plan within 3 months of the version release. Execute major software version upgrades to tools and applications maintained by the vendor within 9 months of Government approval.
• Develop a plan to execute major server operating system upgrades/migrations for all server operating systems maintained by the vendor and obtain government approval of the plan within 3 months of version release.
• Provide technical support for future state transition and management of the JSP's compute and storage environments. This includes supporting coherent migration of apps, data, software, and databases from the JSP's on premise infrastructure to target state infrastructure at a rate of no less than 5% of the total transition requirement per month.
• Ensure an optimized storage environment, inclusive of the following support activities: maintain visibility into storage resources and usage, deliver efficient storage administration, storage virtualization, tiered storage architecture, configuration, storage management software integration, and policy-based storage management.
• Provide an effective maintenance program to achieve improved availability of customer COOP and COB services and a timelier JSP OPS infrastructure response to capacity reallocation and expansion. Within the first 90 calendar days of the order, the contractor shall provide recommendations with respect to changes that will result in improved availability and more timely responses.
• Provide failover integration and support. Support traditional server clustering solutions (i.e. EMC AutoStart and Veritas Cluster Server, Microsoft Cluster Server) on tenant provided compute platforms (i.e. tenant operated hypervisor, and computer hardware).
• Provide backup and recovery services. Provide enterprise data backup and recovery services for JSP and customer supported applications. The backup environment is currently hosted on IBM Spectrum Protect (SP) Application with the limited utilization of Tivoli and Commvault.

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering, computer information systems, telecommunications, or management information systems, and 2 - 7 recent years of documented experience relevant to this key position.
• Information Assurance (IA) Certification: DoDI 8570 IAT II certification.
• Computing Environment (CE) Certification: Recent and relevant technical certification.
• Top Secret security clearance.
• Experience in implementing solution designs and operating environments that are compliant with all Federal and DoD guidance and policies.
• Experience in implementing software and hardware solutions.
• Experience in data replication, failover testing, backup and restore capabilities and plant infrastructure
• Experience in establishing information systems requirements using analysis of the system engineers to develop enterprise wide information systems design in an environment similar in size and scope.
• Experience in estimating and sizing implementation efforts (ie., cost, performance, capacity, manageability, scalability, etc) for storage and backup systems
• Possess demonstrated ability to build and deploy enterprise-level backup and recovery systems for enterprise-wide DR applications from scratch and/or use an application framework to provide best practice solutions for real world business needs.
• Possess experience in enterprise backup and recovery applications such as Commvault, Tivoli, IBM Spectrum Protect, etc.

Preferred Qualifications:

• ITILv4 certification

Physical Requirements:

• Sitting for long periods
• Standing for long periods
• Ambulate throughout an office
• Ambulate between several buildings
• Stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl as required
• Travel by land or air transportation 25% or less

It is the policy of Empower AI to provide equal opportunity in recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting individuals in all job categories without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other protected class or category as may be defined by federal, state, or local laws or regulations. In addition, we affirm that all compensation, benefits, company-sponsored training, educational assistance, social, and recreational programs are administered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity. It is our firm intent to support equal employment opportunity and affirmative action in keeping with applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations.  Empower AI is a VEVRAA Federal Contractor.