US Army to put cloud in containers

January 6, 2012 Off By David
Grazed from Datacenter Dynamics.  Author:  Yevgeniy Sverdlik.

The US Army has awarded a US$250m contract to four companies to build a cloud environment that will reside in both traditional and mobile data centers. MicroTech – one of the awardees – says this is the army’s first cloud computing contract.

MicroTech says it will provide, maintain and support mobile data centers for the Army Private Cloud Mobile (name of the future environment). Services will include providing application hosting in containerized data centers, application migration, as well as cloud services such as Infrastructure- , Platform- and Software-as-a-Service.

Commenting on the contract award, MicroTech president and CEO Tony Jimenez said, “Winning the Army Private Cloud contract is proof that MicroTech’s cloud computing solutions and mobile data centers are cutting edge and provide the best-of-breed solutions the Army needs to get to the next level.”

 
MicroTech does a lot of business with the US government. It is involved in a multitude of other IT-oriented contracts, including delivery of IT equipment and integrated services for the General Services Administration, procurement solutions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, advisory services to the Air Force, IT supplies and support services for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many others.

 

Award of the cloud contract comes as agencies across the federal government try to comply with the White House mandate to consolidate data center footprint and deploy as many services as possible in the cloud.

MicroTech said the private-cloud environment will help the Army consolidate servers and update and optimize its IT infrastructure.

The US Department of Defense has the highest number of data centers and so has to close more facilities than any other government agency. The department aims to have shut down more than 150 data centers between 2010 and the end of 2012.

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