Virtualization: Navy Continuous Training Environment Approach to Cloud Enabling Technologies
(Room S320F)
29 Nov 17
2:00 PM
-
2:30 PM
The Navy Continuous Training Environment (NCTE) was designated a Navy Enterprise Network on 20 OCT 2014. NCTE was growing in size and complexity (e.g., by April 2015, over 50 nodes worldwide and ~650 servers), which prompted the need for enterprise standardization and reduction in infrastructure management requirements. In 2010, the Secretary of Defense directed IT infrastructure consolidation to achieve cost savings, improve DoD mission execution and defend against cyber threats. The Core Data Center Reference Architecture (2012) categorized DoD computing and data storage facilities into four types: Core Data Centers (CDC), Installation Processing Nodes (IPN), Special Purpose Processing Nodes (SPPN), and Tactical/Mobile Processing Nodes (TPN). After declaring NCTE nodes SPPN, the Navy Enterprise Information Governance Board (NEIGB) requested a report on NCTE data center efficiency initiatives. This paper reports on 1) the NCTE SPPN efficiency analysis; 2) the challenges NCTE faced in complying with the DoD mandate to implement cloud-enabling technologies wherever practical; and 3) the team’s approach toward creating an architecture that enables NCTE to support cloud services. The analysis investigated hardware/software efficiencies, operational efficiencies, and implications of adopting alternative life cycle strategies. NCTE supports over 100 distributed Fleet Synthetic Training (FST) events and other afloat and ashore events and experiments annually, thus intensifying the interest in decreasing infrastructure footprint and providing a more flexible, scalable architecture. The effort produced some interesting observations; some expected, others somewhat a surprise. First - Review of the data suggests that efficiencies were achieved across the NCTE SPPN data centers, albeit not necessarily capital expenditure- related. Second – use of Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) appears to improve return on investment (ROI). Third - Geographically dispersed servers a