DISA employees win major award Published April 15, 2011 By Paul Pitcovich Defense Information Systems Agency TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- At the annual DISA 2010 Awards Ceremony held April 7 in Washington, D.C,. local Defense Information Systems Agency employees won the award for Outstanding Achievement in the Computer/Computer Software Field. The five members of the Defense Enterprise Computing Center, Oklahoma City Unisys Technical Support Technical Refresh Team -- Jason Straughn, Larry Clark, Sharlene Halbert, Julie Lund and Doug Byndas -- received the award for their efforts in executing a Technical Refresh of the entire Unisys OS2200 Operating Systems and mass storage environments at three major locations (DECC Ogden, Oklahoma City, and St. Louis). The team's extensive collaborative pre-planning and coordinated execution resulted in the timely delivery of highly available, secure, cost-effective, modern system that provides increased processing capabilities within a reduced footprint. Their solution provided a 230 percent gain in processing power while reducing the hardware footprint by 2,500 square feet. The refresh also included the implementation of a revolutionary Virtual Tape Library system within the environment. The implementation was conducted without the need for modifying customer application code and which accomplished the total elimination of physical tape processing. Critical to the success of the implementation was the ability of the Unisys Technical Support Technical Refresh Team to prevent data loss during migration activities. The Team achieved this result by meticulously scheduling and monitoring all migration processes from the old physical tape to the new virtual tape technology. At the same time they maintained a fallback capability in the event data was required to be recovered and restored. DISA is a Combat Support Agency comprised of 16,000 employees -- military, federal civilian and contract partners -- so the competition for this award was intense.