With 18 data centers dispersed globally, 1,500 employees and 900 contractors, the center has overall computing responsibility for all combat support and application processing across the Defense Department. The apps under the center’s purview range from critical command and control to logistics, finance, personnel readiness and medical.

But that doesn’t mean you have to use DISA for your processing business needs. Beyond two mandates that require all mainframe processing and cross-component apps be under DISA control, Defense organizations are free to handle apps themselves or use a vendor. But Alfred Rivera, director of the DISA center, thinks his center is the better bet.

“The driver is: Can I give a better business case to run it rather than them outsourcing it?” Rivera says. “We work under the Working Capital Fund, which requires that I run the organization like a business. I have to capture revenue, so that drives me to keep my costs low. I get no appropriations funding from DISA. That’s probably the biggest advantage that I have. We are 100 percent customer-funded.”

Rivera says the center, within DISA’s Global Information Grid Combat Support Directorate, runs about 1,400 applications—including 59 mission-critical apps. “We can’t afford for them to be down at all. If the payroll goes down, no one gets paid.”

The center works with 180 software vendors and countless hardware vendors. “We have every flavor of hardware in our inventory, from Hewlett-Packard to Sun Microsystems to Dell to IBM,” Rivera says. “In terms of the hardware itself, it ranges from small workstations all the way to mainframes.”

In all, the center is home to 50 mainframes and 4,500 smaller servers, and has 1.6 petabytes of storage on tap.

DEFENSE SYSTEMS: How does the center’s work affect troops on the front line?
RIVERA: “We’re responsible for the apps that support the main logistics tails, transportation tails and health tails that support the warfighter in theater. We provide the logistics for getting equipment, bullets—whatever it takes. We run the processing that supports all the depots that push supplies out to the theater.”

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