Jim Laurent's Weblog

Last week the Defense Information Systems Agency award a multi-year contract to Sun Federal for "Utility Computing."  As the technical lead on the proposal I am very familiar with the requirements of the RFP and Sun's solution.

What DISA wanted.

DISA operates 18 data centers for the US DoD. Their customers include the military services as well as agencies such as DFAS, DLA, NGIA, TransCOM etc.  Typically DISA or the customer would buy a suite of HW, strap some system adminstrators to the side and send it off to one of their hosting sites.  This required voluminous paperwork, time delays, and capital expenditures.  After 3-4 years, they had to do it all over again.

The purpose of the DISA RFP was to streamline the procurement process by issuing a single contract for Solaris computing capacity provided by the vendor on DISA floor.  Sun retains ownership of the equipment, meters usage and bills DISA based on utilization. DISA provides the floor space, power cooling and operations staff as well as the customer applications.  As workload increases or decreases, Sun adds or removes capacity without additional procurement activities or "surplusing" of equipment.  Sun is an active participant in the monitoring and capacity management of the Solaris based workload.

Now that the easy part is done (winning the award), Sun's next step is to actually put our technologies to work in partnership with DISA.

What's cool about it

This is an all Sun solution where we are the prime contractor and vendor. Sun's offering to DISA makes use of a wide variety of Sun products and services including:

• The Solaris 10 operating system where Sun's unique Containers technology will allow virtualization of DISA workload resulting in high utilization and reduced management costs.
• Sun's comprehensive N1 suite of management, deployment, measurement and monitoring tools to ensure responsive performance and deployment of new workloads.
• Sun Spectrum Platinum 7 x 24 on-site maintenance for around the clock hardware and software support.
• Sun'sVariable Cost Infrastructure service is a true "Utility Computing" service which includes capacity management, architectural oversight, application sizing and utilization based billing.
• Sun's complete range of Sparc and AMD based servers including low power UltraSparc T1 as well as industry standard AMD systems.
• Sun Cluster software for highly available applications providing automatic application failover and horizontal scaling.

Why you should care

This is one of a variety of options for Utility computing from Sun that make us easier to do business with, more responsive and a better partner with the Federal Government.

If you are interested in Sun's products and services, call 800-786-0404.  Our Government telesales team there can answer your questions, provide a GSA quote or connect you with your local Sun Sales team.