Systems integrator Unisys has announced a US$681m project to consolidate seven US local government data centers into the cloud, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Seven Commonwealth of Pennsylvania data centers will become cloud enabled in a process of consolidation that Unisys has run for the state sectors data centers since 1999.

Under the new agreement, the last five Pennsylvania state agencies that have their own data centers will become part of a Unisys-run data center in Harrisburg.

The five data centers will be combined with a Unisys run ‘data power house’ and an enterprise data center, both in Unisys’s Harrisburg campus.

The agencies concerned are the US Departments of Health, Revenue, Labor and Industry, Public Welfare and the State Police.

The contract for the project was awarded to Unisys for seven years with the option for three, one-year renewals.

Initial implementation is expected to be completed in 30 months.

Unisys will be responsible for running the consolidated data center and a backup disaster-recovery data center 200 miles away in Virginia.

The state spokesman for the office of administration Dan Egan said the rationale for the deal is to free the state from having to buy and manage its own servers.

“Pennsylvania will have one of the most extensive outsourced cloud-computing infrastructures among state governments,” Egan said.

Unisys said it will partner with IBM and Deloitte Consulting on the project.

After a joint development venture with Intel in 2013, Unisys released a new fabric computing platform aimed at simplifying the movement from proprietary Unix environments into the Cloud.

It uses Intel’s Xeon family of processors and virtualization technology to create an industry-standard platform, which it said can cut the total cost of ownership of clients’ data by up to 40% and reduce capital expenses by 50 to 60%.