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Information technology takes time for a large authorities bureaucracy to change, and so information technology should come as no surprise that the Section of Defence is still pondering how to make use of this "cloud" people keep talking nigh. The Pentagon is now in the early on planning stages of deploying a deject computing platform called JEDI, just it'south still looking for a contractor to build and maintain it. If you want to throw your chapeau in the ring, you'll need a DVD burner.

The DoD issued an updated request for proposals (or RFP in government contractor parlance) this week. Included in the new RFP is a stipulation that all proposals be delivered by mitt to the contracting role in Arlington, Virginia. The required format is where things get actually strange. The DoD says that it volition only take proposals for JEDI saved to one or more DVDs. Furthermore, each disc delivered equally function of a proposal needs to have the proposal volume number, solicitation number, submitter'south name, and more. Failure to adhere to the rules disqualifies the submitter.

JEDI is intended to be a long-term cloud platform for the DoD, and the contract is worth at to the lowest degree $10 billion. The Pentagon expects edifice and certifying the system will accept around 10 years. JEDI should eliminate the demand for local physical media similar DVDs, which are easily damaged, misplaced, and stolen.

Role of this new submission restriction makes sense. Handing materials to a DoD official in person is more secure than sending it electronically. These documents could one mean solar day get the backbone of a secure government network. The medium is merely foreign, though. Nearly PCs don't even have optical drives anymore, and then someone at the DoD probably put in an gild for a USB drive to read all the discs they're about to get.

The Pentagon is looking for a single provider to handle all the infrastructure and management for JEDI, and then big companies like Microsoft and Amazon are champing at the bit to send over their DVDs. In example you lot've understandably forgotten this factoid, a standard DVD holds 4.7GB of data. Presumably, the documents for a proposal, even a large government contract, will clock in below that threshold.

All the same, DVDs are a baroque means of local storage these days. Why not a USB thumb drive? The reason is probably classified — or just completely arbitrary.

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