HPE wins $931M DoD private cloud contract • The Register
The US Department of Defense on Tuesday awarded Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) a 10-year, $931 million contract to bring cloud conveniences, like unified management and multi-tenancy, to the US military’s most sensitive datacenters.
The Distributed Hybrid Multi-Cloud contract, awarded by the DoD’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), will see the deployment of HPE’s Green Lake Private Cloud offering across its IT footprint.
The platform is designed to mirror the look and feel of a public cloud, replicating many of the key features that have made Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform so attractive while keeping the data and workloads running on prem.
The DoD is particularly interested in the platform’s support for a centralized management plane, which will allow the department to manage the data and resources across its datacenter fleet from a single air-gapped interface, and multi-tenancy, which will enable resource isolation and compartmentalization of sensitive information and workloads to specific divisions.
As with other Green Lake offerings, HPE’s private cloud includes both hardware and software, which are typically billed based on consumption.
The deal announcement doesn’t get into specifics as to what workloads the DoD will be running in its private cloud, but it wouldn’t be 2025 if AI didn’t get some kind of mention. However, we have to imagine they will mostly consist of jobs and datasets deemed too sensitive to deploy on the public cloud resources made available to the Pentagon under the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) program.
The contract’s origins actually date back to the Biden administration. In early 2024, DISA announced the deployment of a prototype deployment of HPE’s Private Cloud offering at its datacenters in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and Ogden, Utah.
This wouldn’t be the HPE’s first time building gov clouds either. You may recall that, back in 2021, the National Security Agency tapped HPE to provide high-performance computing (HPC) services. HPE’s Cray division, meanwhile, has built some of the largest supercomputers in the world for the US Department of Energy. ®
