US Army's new APC drives data

HP has been selected by the US Army as the primary contractor for the new, $249 million Army Private Cloud (APC2) contract. Under the terms of the contract, HP will partner with a variety of well-known enterprise partners, plus 10 small businesses and Alabama A&M University two deliver two different suites of services, as specified by the contract.

The APC2 contract is part of the program to cut down on the number of government datacenters and to streamline and improve government computing services. The first part of the contract will have HP and their partners looking for cost savings by utilizing private cloud services for existing commercial and government owned offices. The second part of the contract is more hardware driven, with the focus being on the capability to deploy containerized datacenters where temporary or tactical computing needs require this type of on-site computing capacity.

Specifically, the contract requires the delivery of the following:

• Cloud Computing Consulting Services

• Application Rationalization

• Network Connectivity

• Information Assurance Support

• Certification and Accreditation Support

• Application Migration

• Private Cloud Operations and Maintenance

• Supply Chain Risk Management

• Service Support

• Service Delivery

• Deployed, Containerized Data Centers

• Application Consolidation Services

The contract is for one year, with four option years and the services, according to the contract specifics, are available to all military services and federal agencies, with the US Army being the primary recipient.

What's interesting in this contract is that it covers both fixed and deployed installations; it will be interesting to see if what is developed from this experience is a single operational model that addresss this broad range of computing needs, or multiple models that address only specific pieces of the contract.