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The US Army has signed a $249.8m deal with primary contractor General Dynamics to manage the creation of something called APC2, and, no it's not a new armored personnel carrier, but rather the next-generation Army Private Cloud. (Sir!)

The contract, which covers the next five years, is what is called an "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" contract, and is part of the Army's LandWarNet initiative, which seeks to lower the Army's IT bill by consolidating data centers and moving to cloudy (and therefore more flexible and more highly utilized) infrastructure. It is a major effort. (Sir!)

According to a report in Defense Systems, IBM, Lockheed Martin, HP, Northrop Grumman, Criterion, and Microtech are also eating at the APC2 mess.

What all of them are doing is unclear at this point, but HP's own statement notes that the company's Enterprise Services outsourcing unit was tapped by GD for setting up private clouds in commercial facilities and buildings owned by Uncle Sam.

HP is also building containerized data centers for the Army to deploy adjacent to existing facilities or tactically during overseas operations. HP is partnering with Alabama A&M University and ten other small businesses to provide network maintenance, supply chain, cloud operations, and other support.

You know how Congress likes to spread the money around their districts.

The Army has hundreds of data centers, many of them underutilized, and is trying to shut down 185 of them by 2015. Last September, the Army lowered the boom (surely that was the Navy?) and halted new data center build outs and renovations and shot down (surely that is the Air Force?) any new requisitions for new servers because it has so much excess capacity. ®

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