The Army is gearing up to award a contract for its data center pilot at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, one Army official said.
Col. Rodney Swann, chief of enterprise architecture at the Army Architecture Integration Center, told an audience at an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association event hosted by the D.C. chapter Wednesday that the Army is expecting its contract to be awarded at the end of the month, or at least by the first quarter of 2017.
During a briefing with reporters in July, Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Robert Ferrell said: "What we're going to do in this pilot is pull the apps from these 11 data centers," all of which are Army-owned data centers on the base.
"So imagine a typical data center in DoD; it's running at maximum, maybe 60 percent, that's really best case. And so we're actually leaving money on the table, so by collapsing these 11 data centers just imagine from an operational, from a technical, from an efficiency side of the house that we will save on doing that," Ferrell said. "This will be a proof of concept, if you will, that we will get … lessons learned for it."
Swann said Wednesday: "We're expecting that to be awarded and then we'll be given the work there at Redstone as an on-premise Army private cloud instantiation."
"Redstone is going to be a key component of the Army cloud strategy. We're formulating documents, we're getting our policies in line with the operational intent of what we want to do strategically. Once we get the Redstone kicked off and get lessons learned from that, that's going to inform a lot of how we go forward in cloud computing," he continued.
Following his appearance on the panel, he told C4ISRNET that 25 applications have been identified and targeted for migration. "Once we do those migrations," he said, "then we're going to reach operational capability, probably sometime in '17. … Then eventually once we do that we're going to begin to build that velocity [and] be able to migrate more and more applications."
The vision for the pilot is to take this model to other installations within the United States; Fort Bragg, Fort Carson and Fort Knox. "It's to take that ... this is what the on-premise model looks like … this is how we're going to do it," Swann said.
Defense Department Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen has previously talked about the on-premise cloud initiative several times. "So we are going to announce this summer that we are going to move to an on-prem cloud-based system that will include hybrid clouds and pubic clouds. But when I say based on prem, a cloud that provides us more enterprise capability and services so that we can absolutely talk better within DoD, share data," he said in June.
The on-premise capability is envisioned for "capabilities that move to the cloud environment but we don't necessarily feel comfortable with the data not sitting on DoD property," John Hale, chief of enterprise applications at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said during Wednesday's panel.
However, Hale added that the real money saver for the department is off-premise commercial clouds, calling it the "biggest bang for the buck," as it leverages infrastructure and software as a service.
In congressional testimony in March, Halvorsen provided his outlook for the next five years in cloud, offering that he hopes the department will be in an almost complete virtual-cloud environment with private clouds and hybrid clouds.
"We'll have private clouds, which are completely private within segments of DoD, we'll have private clouds that are just DoD — you know, inside it — we'll have private clouds that are DoD and other parts of the federal government, and then we'll have hybrid public clouds because of the size of DoD and the federal government we ought to be able to move into where we would have government hybrid clouds hosted in commercial centers as opposed to some of the things I talked about earlier what would be on premise, it would give us the best combination of mission security and value," he told the House Armed Services Committee.
The Army's effort appears to fall in line with the near-term focus of the fourth goal in DoD's "Information Technology Environment Way Forward to Tomorrow's Strategic Landscape" — rolled out by Halvorsen in late August — to "establish an on premise managed cloud service capability by the fourth quarter fiscal year 2017."
"My intent is to create a hybrid portfolio for the Army to allow units to select where they would like to store their data — not everything is going to move to the cloud," Ferrell said in July. "When I say a hybrid portfolio, that’s off premise where it’s hosted by commercial industry partners, on premise still hosted by a commercial industry partner or a mil cloud that’s managed by DISA."
When asked if this effort is across the department and issued from Halvorsen, Ferrell responded: "Mr. Halvorsen laid out those opportunities. I would just say that we are leaning forward and trying to provide that capability sooner than later and provide the lessons learned for our sister services to use as they move down that same path."
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
