Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), a combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense (DoD), has awarded HPE with a prototype Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreement to develop its Distributed Hybrid Multi-Cloud (DHMC) prototype as part of a phased-acquisition approach. HPE will develop the prototype on HPE GreenLake, and upon successful completion, it will enable DISA to simplify management of its disparate IT infrastructure and resources across public and private clouds through a unified hybrid, multi-cloud platform.

"We're honored that DISA has selected HPE to develop this innovative prototype and with a successful completion, HPE GreenLake will have the opportunity to be the secure hybrid, multi-cloud platform where DISA can deliver innovative managed services to the agencies it supports," said Fidelma Russo, executive vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud and chief technology officer, HPE. "With this visionary project, and the eventual potential to deliver a sovereign cloud for DISA, HPE continues to expand upon its hybrid cloud leadership and solutions with HPE GreenLake."

The revitalization under the prototype OTA, if successful, will bring together isolated and independent infrastructure environments within DISA's J9 Hosting and Compute into a modernized DHMC infrastructure and services offering. The eventual revitalization is expected to reduce DISA's IT footprint, costs and management complexity. Until now, DISA's J9 HaC has managed multiple hosting environments independent of, and isolated from one another with different management planes, processes and portals for DISA systems administrators.

HPE will develop a prototype that meets DISA's key requirements of managing on-premises and commercial cloud services through a single hybrid cloud control plane capable of supporting multi-tenancy, virtual private clouds, and comprehensive data privacy and protection through a zero-trust architecture. With support from trusted partner Iron Bow Technologies, HPE will assist DISA in testing and validating the advanced capabilities from HPE GreenLake private cloud solutions through prototype deployments in DISA data centers in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania and Ogden, Utah.

The successful implementation of the prototype and a secure private cloud on HPE GreenLake will enable DISA to scale and accelerate communications and application deployment, including the ability to effectively apply more artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics. This will help ensure mission-critical outcomes for warfighters at the speed required by real-time, global operations.

With a successful prototype, HPE GreenLake will bring the agility, scalability, and automation of the public cloud experience together with the performance and security provided by an on-premises private cloud. The HPE GreenLake platform will also provide full visibility to multiple commercial cloud service providers, with unified management through a single pane of glass that allows users to provision, manage, and monitor a variety of cloud services across private and public clouds.

DISA, headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland, provides, operates, and assures command and control and information-sharing capabilities across a global enterprise information infrastructure. It provides direct support for joint warfighters, and the full spectrum of military operations for missions and coalition partners.