Sidebar: Army Begins Consolidating Enterprise Application Servers

Computerworld - 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.
Joe Capps, director of enterprise systems technology activity at the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command in Arlington, Va., said the move is expected to cut costs and make Army operations more efficient.
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, Capps said. 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 servers to be consolidated include machines running applications such as logistics and business processing software. In addition, Capps said the project will include data storage consolidation. "Storage-area networks just make sense from a business standpoint," he said.
Until now, the Army's IT departments have consolidated only some Web applications. Because some of the Web consolidation work has been completed, the experience gained "should make the enterprise-level consolidation less challenging," Capps said.
The initial effort includes two data centers to ensure redundancy. Local servers running applications used for research and development and for location-specific needs won't be included in the consolidation. That will allow bases to retain high-processing capabilities for their individual research, Capps said.
Capps wouldn't disclose a price tag for the project and didn't have any estimates of how much money the Army hopes to save. He said only that he expects the savings to be "significant."
Michael Dortch, an analyst at Robert Frances Group Inc. in Westport, Conn., said the Army's consolidation effort is on the same track as many private-sector projects.
"Government doesn't have a monopoly on moving slowly when it comes to building consensus," Dortch said, noting that such projects are a "very daunting" task.
A potential benefit of the Army's plan, though, is that corporate IT managers could use it to add credibility to their efforts to consolidate servers inside their companies, Dortch said. "There are a lot of IT people who make perfectly valid arguments for server consolidation and still don't get the money to do it," he said.

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