U.S. Army Moves to Consolidate App Servers

Big Iron The U.S. Army is heeding lessons learned from corporate America by building data centers to consolidate local enterprise application servers now running at hundreds of Army bases nationwide. The plan, announced earlier this month at an Army IT conference, will start later this year with an effort over 12 to 18 months to create two data centers, each hooked up to four bases. Over the next four years, all application servers running at all U.S. bases will be networked together in up to six data centers. The Army Network Enterprise Technology Command in Arlington, VA will consolidate machines running applications such as logistics and business processing software, and the project is also slated to include data storage consolidation via Storage-Area Networks (SANs). To date, the group’s experience has mostly involved consolidating some web applications. For more information, read Computerworld (June 20, 2005) – Army Begins Consolidating Enterprise Application Servers http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,102615,00.html