Army next generation deployable edge, computation, and storage capability

The Authority has identified a short-term requirement for hardware that is essential to support the success of upcoming military exercises.

This contract shall provide a secure, field‑deployable, edge compute and data storage capability to support Corps and Divisional‑level headquarters in degraded, disconnected and denied environments. The requirement enables the hosting of workloads at SECRET and underpins readiness and deterrence activity in support of NATO and UK operations.

This requirement supports the Army’s need to generate a next‑generation capability that can: 1) operate at SECRET, 2) integrate with the Hyperscale Cloud Solution (HCS), and 3) host mission‑critical decision support and targeting workloads in contested environments. This contract is required to enable credible readiness and deterrence demonstrations that support in de‑risking future delivery decisions through controlled deployment, testing and evaluation of a secure edge architecture.

The capability must:

• Function entirely offline in DDIL environments with no dependencies on other cloud regions or installations for setup or operation.
• Provide access to low-latency AI models for local processing of text, video and translation.
• Provide native kubernetes support to enable ease of migration, deployment and management of cloud-native applications.
• Provide fleet management capabilities.
• Provide a consistent experience to other environments and de-risk the migration of cloud applications from Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Air Gapped (AG) to the edge; and,
• Provide an architectural identical platform to the HCS to de-risk future platform migrations.

The Authority is seeking nine (9) Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) edge devices (“Products”). The further requirements of these devices are considered sensitive in nature.

The supply of GDC devices is delivered by British Telecommunications plc (BT). They are the sole authorised reseller of the specific devices.