By Geoff Fein

A few years ago, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) began an effort to get processing and storage capacity on demand–buying capacity as a service and not as capital equipment.

Now the agency is hoping to convince its software vendors to follow the same approach and include software licensing as a service, according to a DISA official.

The goal is to acquire service that turns up and turns down software usage in a similar fashion without having to buy licenses for a set number of users, John Garing, chief information officer and director of strategic planning for DISA, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.

“We have been grinding our way through our software vendors trying to get that as well,” he said. “Their business models currently do not support software usage on demand.”

Garing pointed out that the server and storage company business model did not support the capacity on demand that DISA now has. He’s hoping that just as those companies were able to figure out a way to do it, so will the software industry be able to figure out how to move away from a per seat, per license, per enclave model to a turn on and turn off capacity on demand utility.

He acknowledged it’s very hard to do this.

“Intellectually they understand and support this, but it’s very hard because it gets into how they declare revenue,” Garing said. “We’re a fraction of their business, and they have commercial and consumer business that they have to support and having a different way of doing it for DoD than their private sector companies is hard…it’s a challenge.

“We have talked with all the big ones and continue to talk with them at senior levels…very senior levels. I don’t think they have found a way to do it yet,” he added.

DISA began acquiring processing and storage capacity as a service in December ’01, when they did data replication and mirroring between Unisys [UIS] main frame sites that the agency had in its computing centers in Ogden, Utah and Oklahoma City, Okla.

“We paid the company for replication and mirroring, over the 800 miles, as a service. We didn’t have to buy anything,” Garing said. “We have used that a number of times, and the two most prominent examples are the four contracts we have for processing power on demand and the one contract we have for storage on demand.”

In those cases, the suppliers provide processing capacity in DISA’s data centers, not their own,” he added.

“They retain the capital ownership and they provide us capacity that can be turned on and turned off like a water spigot. We pay for only what we use…the capacity can go up and it can go down,” Garing said.

The same applies for storage on demand, Garing noted. “We pay for storage as we consume it. We pay for it like [you] would pay for a utility in your home.”

Garing added, the idea is that the agency got away from having to go through the procurement process for a new server or new central processing unit (CPU) or a new set of disks every time they had to go up and down for storage.

“We can turn this stuff on in a matter of days…actually less than that. I think the contract says 30 days is the limit the providers have. Actually we have done it in a matter of hours,” he said.

“We get speed of acquisition. Secondly, if you couple that concept with virtualized processing and storage, we now have the ability not to isolate a server and only use 15, 20 percent of its capacity. We can turn capacity off when it’s not needed and we can also virtualize and get better efficiency as well.”

So the concept of capacity-on-demand is to get at speed, be more efficient, and be cheaper, Garing said. “We are cutting all the procurement backend costs for adding a CPU, another server or another rack storage…so that’s one thing.

The second idea is something referred to as managed service.

Capacity-on-demand is a form of managed service, Garing noted. Another form of managed service is the way DISA has acquired collaboration tools.

“Those are actually commercial services that we pay for as a service. We didn’t buy a thing. We didn’t buy one line of software, we didn’t buy one piece of hardware…we paid for a service,” he said. “Again, that’s a technique that has some strength but it also has some limitations. We found out the more commoditized something is, the better a candidate it is for managed service. The more specialized it is, the worse candidate it is.”

These are two of the ways DISA is trying to keep up with the speed at which information technology (IT) changes, Garing added.

With the capacity on demand contracts, DISA does not specify what kind of hardware is used, except to say it has to be the most current release. Technology refresh is paid for in the contract, Garing said.

Garing added that Defense Department is leading in this effort. “I don’t think anyone else in the federal government is doing it now.”

“We took what some call utility computing in the private sector, [where] you actually rent capacity in somebody else’s data center, and we just changed it for security reasons to put it in our data centers,” he said.

DISA awarded the processing and storage-on-demand contracts in the past two to three years, Garing said.

“We are finding that the capacity-on-demand concept is fundamental to our cloud computing initiatives. Ideally a warfighting force goes some place connects to the network and then provisions services it needs on the network for its particular place, and time. The backend of that has to be this capacity-on-demand concept to give us the scalability we need,” he explained.

“We are finding the more standard we can get people to operate in Linux and Windows the easier that is. If there is one lesson to be learned there, it’s easier and more flexible to have a standard platform in the computing centers rather than have stand alones,” Garing said.

“What we are talking about today is a web services environment where anybody can hit the platform. You don’t know how many people, who they are, where they are from, or how long they will be on. But you have to keep the platform up and able to service whoever might hit it. A fundamental of that is having this capacity-on-demand concept.”