ADS Storage, Infra & Security Upgrade and SPCB Hardware Refresh

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.

There have been 2 requirements received, which are as follows:

AHE STORAGE UPDGRADE

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 procurement is required utilising the cost recovery funding.

AHE INFRASTRUCTURE AND SECURITY UPGRADES

To maintain a secure AHE environment that fulfils the demand, replacing end-of-life hardware and software and increasing throughput of devices commensurate with demand, these essential infrastructure security components require replacement to ensure ADS are to a supported state and version. They will need to integrate within the existing AHE architecture and will be patched and maintained to ensure that they are under mainstream support.

And a requirement for the Service Police Crime Bureau (SPCB) for the Application Support Team (AST) within SPCB is responsible for managing and maintaining all Service Police Information Systems namely the CRIMES network architecture within the Southwick Park datacentre. The CRIMES datacentre houses the Service Police's most critical IT systems and services that are vital to the continuity of Service Police capabilities and operational effectiveness worldwide.

The current CRIMES system hardware is at its end of life, and out of support. Although fault resilience is built in, this is now a single point of failure.