Sun Gets Big DISA Utility Computing Contract, Too

Published: November 16, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A few weeks after Hewlett-Packard announced that it had inked two very large utility computing contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense's IT arm, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Sun Microsystems has announced that it, too, has signed its own utility computing deal with DISA.

The Sun Microsystems Federal subsidiary, which is run by chairman and founder Scott McNealy, got the contract, which will deliver utility-style computing capacity for DISA for a five-year term with a three-year optional extension. The total value of the contract has a ceiling of $125 million.

Under the terms of the contract, Sun will provide Solaris 10 server capacity in 18 DISA data centers. DISA has over 1,400 applications, which do the military equivalent of supply chain management and ERP--which is combat support and command and control, in the military parlance, and it offers these applications to the armed forces on a pay-per-use basis. If DISA wants to provide application capacity on a for-fee basis, it needs suppliers that provide infrastructure capacity on a for-fee basis, too. Sun will own the hardware installed at the DISA data centers, which will be a mix of Sparc and Opteron boxes. The servers will be equipped with Sun Cluster for load balancing and high availability, and will use Solaris Containers to virtualize capacity and N1 System Manager to manage it.

The contracts that HP signed with DISA were bigger. The first HP utility computing contract at DISA was to deploy HP-UX on an unspecified number of Integrity systems; this deal was capped at $250 million over eight years. Another $190 million contract covered utility capacity on ProLiant X64-based systems, which will support a mix of Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server over eight years.

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