Provision of ADS AHE Compute (DInfoCom/0158)

BACKGROUND & REQUIREMENT

Army Digital Services (ADS) supports the Army Hosting Environment (AHE) which currently hosts around 90 business applications and services for the Army and wider Defence across three security domains (Official, Official-Sensitive and SECRET). This private cloud delivers network, compute and storage capabilities. To provide a consistent environment and to minimise training/support costs, ADS have standardised on cost effective elements from Cisco (compute/networking) and PureStorage (storage).

The AHE is the only accredited Defence owned Private Cloud hosting capability that is available across both the RLI and SLI networks. It provides scalable hosting capabilities and application services for Army and wider Defence. As the defence hosting strategy has evolved the aim of MODcloud has shifted from a 'build and they will come' methodology to identifying the best extant capabilities and looking to re-use and enhance. The AHE is viewed as an exemplar in this area. ADS now have a cost model to enable TLBs to 'Pay' (cost recovery) for their hosting. However, as the hosting environment shifts to this model the system needs to be able to easily scale up and out and if demand dictates scale to multiple sites.

AHE COMPUTE UPGRADE

ADS currently charges customers for capacity using a cost recovery (non-profit) model. To enable timely delivery of capacity, customers are provided with capacity from non-committed AHE resources. To ensure additional capacity is available along with replacement of end-of-life data diode, procurement is required utilising the cost recovery funding.