The cloud computing approach furnishes the massive storage capacity for the upwards of 75 million records created since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and the incoming data from 600 source feeds. To build DSC, the Army relied heavily on open source platforms and software available in the commercial and government sectors, thereby avoiding costly licensing fees and keeping down development costs in a highly constrained budget environment.
The Army, which served as the systems integrator for the project, owns not only open-framework platforms used on the project, but also a large portion of the software, Miller said.