4 ms·

What would you suggest as the alternative? Have DISA write their own tech stack, operating systems, and cloud services? This is a freaking great deal for the go

by blister 10y ago

What would you suggest as the alternative? Have DISA write their own tech stack, operating systems, and cloud services? This is a freaking great deal for the government.

xj9 10y ago
RedHat
- blister 10y ago
  DISA is a big group. They have mountains of RedHat instances already as well. I would bet they've probably got a billion dollars or so invested in the RedHat infrastructure. If I had to hazard a guess without seeing the SOW/PWS, I would bet that most of this MS contract would cover desktop support services. DISA supports IT services for a huge portion of the DoD. This is basically a Fortune 100 company in terms of employees and scale.
  - nkassis 10y ago
    Probably more like multiple Fortune 100 companies combined.
    - niels_olson 10y ago
      Are we talking DoD or DISA? DISA is probably close to a Fortune 100 company. DoD's annual spend exceeds Apple's market cap. The annual research budget is $40B+
- Bedon292 10y ago
  I don't have any real numbers to back it up, but I have been told that Red Hat costs the government more money per machine for the licenses. At least within the DoD. Now this could well be attributed to buying less licenses, and not getting as much bulk discount. But Red Hat not necessarily a cheaper option. And even if you got the license costs down you would still have to pay absurd amounts in retraining the entire workforce.
ageofwant 10y ago
What about getting rid of a parasitic rent-seeking monopolistic offender that is currently holding your organisation ransom to the amount of almost one beeeeeelion dollars ? $927M buys you a lot of OpenStack, and no chains.
- blister 10y ago
  Holding them ransom? They chose this at the highest levels. I was in DoD for the transition from Sun to MS on the desktop. You're off by orders of magnitude. My one, tiny little facility had an IT department of several hundred to support the crazy infrastructure stuff we had to deal with. And don't assume that they're not also using other services and providers as well. How would you provide desktop services and solutions to 80,000 people distributed all over the world? If you have a solution that doesn't cost $1bn, please write the white paper. I'll gladly write the RFP response and we can enjoy our profits. :D The numbers may seem staggering, but this is how much shit costs in the government. Most of our competitors in my space are offering services with 2%-4% margins because the government is so stingy about how the work is performed. DISA alone is probably at nearly the scale of AWS in terms of compute power and system requirements. And they probably have 5-10x the number of employees. It's not a trivial problem to solve, and I've been working for contractors for 10+ years now.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I'd start with a base image of an enterprise Linux on certified configurations of hardware. This could be a VM, CD they'd burn, or Live USB. Specialize it to some more for specific roles. Semi-automate that part esp for creation, testing (esp updates), and distribution. Host it on those cheap, storage sites with verification & other tools pre-installed on their desktops by local admins. One UNIX admin at each remote site with standardized tools for the various functions like DNS, email, etc. A centralized solution for communications, workflow, secure sharing, and so on. They just access it over the internet with replication to a few sites (or even all filtered by whose present there) to get availability or extra performance. I'm not seeing this cost $1 billion even if I did it with VMS clusters. Even that overpriced system that ran whole enterprises was under $100,000/yr licensing per branch with mega-fee for main offices. I can't guess how much support would take but imagine local admins handling a portion of it. If it's just Linux desktops, extra load might be offloaded to vetted consultants or companies that do it on the cheap with anything they do logged. Admins or local developers come up with design improvements or tools for recurring problems.

by blister 10y ago

What would you suggest as the alternative? Have DISA write their own tech stack, operating systems, and cloud services? This is a freaking great deal for the government.

xj9 10y ago

RedHat

blister 10y ago
DISA is a big group. They have mountains of RedHat instances already as well. I would bet they've probably got a billion dollars or so invested in the RedHat infrastructure. If I had to hazard a guess without seeing the SOW/PWS, I would bet that most of this MS contract would cover desktop support services. DISA supports IT services for a huge portion of the DoD. This is basically a Fortune 100 company in terms of employees and scale.
- nkassis 10y ago
  Probably more like multiple Fortune 100 companies combined.
  - niels_olson 10y ago
    Are we talking DoD or DISA? DISA is probably close to a Fortune 100 company. DoD's annual spend exceeds Apple's market cap. The annual research budget is $40B+
Bedon292 10y ago
I don't have any real numbers to back it up, but I have been told that Red Hat costs the government more money per machine for the licenses. At least within the DoD. Now this could well be attributed to buying less licenses, and not getting as much bulk discount. But Red Hat not necessarily a cheaper option. And even if you got the license costs down you would still have to pay absurd amounts in retraining the entire workforce.

ageofwant 10y ago

What about getting rid of a parasitic rent-seeking monopolistic offender that is currently holding your organisation ransom to the amount of almost one beeeeeelion dollars ? $927M buys you a lot of OpenStack, and no chains.

blister 10y ago
Holding them ransom? They chose this at the highest levels. I was in DoD for the transition from Sun to MS on the desktop. You're off by orders of magnitude. My one, tiny little facility had an IT department of several hundred to support the crazy infrastructure stuff we had to deal with. And don't assume that they're not also using other services and providers as well. How would you provide desktop services and solutions to 80,000 people distributed all over the world? If you have a solution that doesn't cost $1bn, please write the white paper. I'll gladly write the RFP response and we can enjoy our profits. :D The numbers may seem staggering, but this is how much shit costs in the government. Most of our competitors in my space are offering services with 2%-4% margins because the government is so stingy about how the work is performed. DISA alone is probably at nearly the scale of AWS in terms of compute power and system requirements. And they probably have 5-10x the number of employees. It's not a trivial problem to solve, and I've been working for contractors for 10+ years now.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I'd start with a base image of an enterprise Linux on certified configurations of hardware. This could be a VM, CD they'd burn, or Live USB. Specialize it to some more for specific roles. Semi-automate that part esp for creation, testing (esp updates), and distribution. Host it on those cheap, storage sites with verification & other tools pre-installed on their desktops by local admins. One UNIX admin at each remote site with standardized tools for the various functions like DNS, email, etc. A centralized solution for communications, workflow, secure sharing, and so on. They just access it over the internet with replication to a few sites (or even all filtered by whose present there) to get availability or extra performance. I'm not seeing this cost $1 billion even if I did it with VMS clusters. Even that overpriced system that ran whole enterprises was under $100,000/yr licensing per branch with mega-fee for main offices. I can't guess how much support would take but imagine local admins handling a portion of it. If it's just Linux desktops, extra load might be offloaded to vetted consultants or companies that do it on the cheap with anything they do logged. Admins or local developers come up with design improvements or tools for recurring problems.