DISA Call for White Papers

Overview

Technologies, and technology-based companies, advance so rapidly that the Department of Defense is finding it difficult to contractually engage, collaborate, and do business with high-tech companies. The traditional procurement process is too slow and based on regulations rather than negotiations. The Government's cost-based pricing system is cumbersome and expensive requiring unique accounting and auditing systems. The Government's standard approach to intellectual property can be overreaching and inflexible. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is responding to this by exercising its authority under 10 U.S.C. 2371b, Other Transaction Agreements for Prototypes. DISA will periodically post Requests for White Papers inviting companies leading innovation to submit their solutions to the Agency's capability gaps, problem statements, or areas of interest.

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Distributed Hybrid Multi Cloud RFI

Due Date: 21 April 2023

Project Number: DISA-OTA-23-R-DHMCRFI

Background

The DISA Hosting and Compute Center (HaCC) is transforming the way it is delivering hosting and compute solutions across the Department. This transformational strategy is driving toward solutions that are hybrid, distributed, and multi-cloud. Partnering with industry to achieve these objectives is paramount for success.

The HaCC currently has multiple x86 hosting environments completely isolated and independent of one another. Each environment has different management planes and different processes. To streamline management of assets for both our customers and for our administrators, HaCC aims to develop a management plane that centralizes all current capabilities, with additional improvement capabilities and innovative processes, into a single centralized control plane.

This effort will develop a single environment that rationalizes and encompasses all x86 commodity within the HaCC, merging disparate components into a modernized distributed, hybrid, and multi cloud (DHMC) infrastructure and services offering. This environment will be managed through a single centralized control plane. Commercial cloud assets, on-premises cloud assets, traditional virtualized assets, and dedicated host connected assets will all be managed through a single customizable control plane.

The DHMC solution will be housed in a consolidated stack located within multiple DISA datacenters. This stack should be standardized for eventual, uniform deployment to multiple sites, including OCONUS. This will result in a distributed, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment that is hosted on premises.

The new acquisition will include a modern technology implementation strategy that will achieve a rapid deployment of the new DHMC solution. In addition to a rapid deployment strategy will be a streamlined and modern migration strategy for existing workloads hosted in the Hosting and Compute Center's current x86 environments.

A customizable, unified on-premises control plane will offer a novel, easily managed interface, for both tenants and administrators, to commercial cloud service providers.

The HaCC envisions its new infrastructure having several desired key features and technologies. Integration of these key features and technologies into a customizable, unified on-premises control plane is a Critical Success Indicator:

• Distributed, Hybrid, and Multi-cloud ready
• Hosted on premises
• Unified and customizable control plane for additional internal services
• Multi-Tenancy support with full customer environment segmentation
• Utility based billing and reporting (pay-as-you-go)
• Elasticity and Automated Scalability of physical hardware within the stack
• Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for granular security management of tenant access
• Infrastructure as Code ready for Ansible and Terraform;
• Interoperability support for existing HaCC enterprise level tools
• Automated scalability
• Monitoring and Alerting
• Centralized portal for security posture
• High Availability (HA) implementations for resources
• Integrated file and image level backup solution
• Full disaster recovery and migration solution to allow agnostic migration capabilities
• Tenant Billing portal

Distributed Hybrid Multi Cloud RFI [PDF]

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