NSA Cloud Capabilities See Boost Under New Billion-Dollar Contract with HPE

The National Security Agency tapped Hewlett Packard Enterprise to provide high-performance computing technology—as a service—through the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, via a new $2 billion contract.

This service is set to go into operation in 2022 and the agreement will unfold over a 10-year time frame.

“Customers are demanding HPC capabilities on their most data-intensive projects combined with easy, simple, and agile management,” Justin Hotard, HPE’s senior vice president and general manager, HPC and Mission Critical Solutions, said in a statement shared with Nextgov on Tuesday. He added that the new platform will provide the agency with “solutions to tackle a range of complex data needs, but with a flexible, as a service experience.”

Essentially Greenlake offers managed and secure cloud services, directly on-premises. 

It incorporates servers and systems that take in high volumes of data and support artificial intelligence and deep learning uses. The technology company will also build and manage the entire solution. It’ll be hosted at a compliant data center owned by QTS.

According to an NSA spokesperson, the contract is "a continuation of NSA’s Hybrid Compute Initiative (HCI) to modernize and address the robust processing and analytical requirements of the Agency." NSA for years has been systematically moving to the cloud, and pursues a range of high performance computing workloads. The agency recently awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Amazon under the same initiative, which is under protest. 

Editor's note: This story was updated to include comment from the NSA.