分类： IT业界
2009-03-02 10:16:30
The U.S. Army Intelligence Center (USAIC), the professional training school for military intelligence, provides cross-branch training to as many as 17,000 personnel annually. In an effort to improve overall efficiency and reduce costs, the USAIC migrated its training system from a PC-based solution to a distributed client-server solution based on 6,000 Sun Ray thin clients, Sun Ray Software and 200 Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers running 2,500 virtual machines.
USAIC trains Intelligence professionals on the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A), the Army's primary battlefield intelligence system, which analysts use to gather and distribute intelligence information. The system comprises many tools and applications that run on a variety of operating systems and are supported by hundreds of databases. Users access the system through a Windows desktop interface.
The center's PC-based system operated in about 40 classrooms, each with 30 to 40 computers with hard disks configured with applications specifically required for a particular course. Students stored their work - including test answers - on the computers' hard disks.
When a class graduated, the IT staff required several days to completely reconfigure each classroom, which entailed removing and inventorying the hard disks, wiping the disks, cleaning up all of the databases, reimaging and reinstalling the hard disks. To accomplish this process, USAIC required an IT staff of approximately 40 people. With each PC costing from $2,000 to $5,000 and requiring multiple removable hard disks, the cost of each system could rise to $15,000.
With the advent of DCGS-A, and with virtualization a proven concept, USAIC began looking at piloting the virtualization of DCGS-A on its existing Sun Ray thin client classroom infrastructure to offset the cost of deploying real DCGS-A systems across the campus.
Using VMware ESX software, USAIC configured some of its servers as virtual machines and delivered the DCGS-A system to users on Sun Ray thin clients. After testing several vendors' thin client products, USAIC chose Sun Ray thin clients because they could support the broadest range of applications and operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris. These thin clients also posed little to no security risk because, unlike competitive products, they have no hard disk, memory, or operating system to update. And at just a few hundred dollars each, the Sun Ray thin clients were a fraction of the cost of PCs or laptops.
The center chose the Sun Fire X4600 server because it delivered the best performance and the highest server consolidation ratio at 40:1. Other vendors' solutions would have required two to three times the number of servers. With redundant power supplies and multiple RAID arrays, the Sun Fire X4600 server is highly reliable, so downtime was not an issue. Today, USAIC runs about 200 Sun Fire X4600 servers supporting 6,000 Sun Ray thin clients in close to 170 classrooms across its campus.
In one year, USAIC saved $31 million in hardware costs alone. In addition, labor costs have been cut by more than 90% because virtualization and the use of Sun Ray thin clients makes it possible for the IT staff to reimage all virtual machines in a matter of minutes rather than spending several days manually wiping and reconfiguring computers. Just two people rather than USAIC's 40 person IT staff can manage the entire solution. What used to take 40 staff four days can now be accomplished by two staff members in a fraction of that time.
With this infrastructure in place, classrooms are better utilized and easier to schedule because more classrooms are available more of the time. Because the Sun Ray 2 thin clients draws about 5% of the power of a typical PC, power and cooling costs for USAIC have dropped dramatically.
