U.S. Navy Intranet Realizes Big Savings Through Virtualization

EDS has helped the military in consolidating 1,200 x86 servers down to 200, each hosting multiple VMware ESX virtual machines. By Charles Babcock InformationWeek The Navy and Marine Corps Intranet, one of the largest networks in the federal government, is providing a lesson to the private sector on how to cut energy consumption and save capital costs. The massive intranet ties together 700,000 users and disparate Naval facilities from the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va., to centers and shipyards in San Diego, Hawaii and Japan. The NMCI is run off of 40 different server farms. IN 2001, managing NMCI was outsourced to EDS, the Plano, Texas, IT services group that recently became an HP subsidiary, and it won plaudits when it got the network up and running again one week after taking a hit in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The... [read full story]