The governors of Maryland and West Virginia are pushing the US Navy to use an Allegany Ballistics Laboratory (ABL) data center in West Virginia as a target facility to consolidate some of its data center capacity into.

“The unique data related services it provides to the Navy and other entities within the Defense Department in a secure, state of the art information technology environment has the capacity to meet these new DoD IT requirements at an affordable price with minimal capital investment,” Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and West Virginia governor Earl Ray Tomblin wrote about the data center in a letter to secretary of the Navy Edwin Mabus.

The governors’ pitch includes ABL’s location close to Washington, D.C., an active existing Navy presence, availability of skilled workforce, experienced data center management and other characteristics.

The facility is managed by IBM, which has recently made an investment in ABL and plans to expand its activities there, the governors wrote. There, IBM is running data centers for a variety of other federal agencies at the site, including the DoD, National Archives, Records Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The governors are seeking to capitalize on the requirement the Navy has to reduce its data center footprint and the amount of money it spends on data centers and IT infrastructure. The requirement was included in the 2012 defense budget of the US.