DISA opens cloud computing platform to production use

The Defense Information Systems Agency's (DISA) new cloud-computing offering is now available for production use. First unveiled a year ago, the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) allowed defense developers to provision virtual servers for the testing and development of new applications.

In fact, the technical program director of DISA's computing services and RACE team, Henry Sienkiewicz, was confident enough to tell Network World that RACE is more secure and stable than commercial cloud services such as those run by Google. Elaborating, Sienkiewicz said, "We achieve 99.999 percent availability at all times." Google, on the other hand, claims 99.9 percent availability for Google Apps.

Of course, I would say that the controlled environment that RACE is cacooned in, versus the wide-open Internet for Google could well be the reason for the difference in uptime. Whatever the case, the clear advantage of RACE in comparison to commercial providers is the familiarity of DISA with meeting defense security standards.

RACE runs off VMware and offers Windows Server and standard Linux to the tune of $1,200 per month, per server.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World
- check out this article at Washington Technology

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