It's critical for the military to have storage systems that can handle ever-expanding data loads, says Dixon: The U.S. Army alone experienced data growth of 200 percent annually over the last two years.
The SAN that NetCentrics maintains for the Army was originally deployed two years ago as part of a server and storage consolidation project initiated by the Pentagon Renovation Program (PenRen) to modernize the IT infrastructure of the U.S. military. PenRen's overall mission was accelerated after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which destroyed portions of the Pentagon.
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, NetCentrics accepted a joint bid by EMC and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) for a number of Symmetrix 8830 storage arrays and McData Intrepid 6064 64-port Fibre Channel directors. (Dixon was unable to provide the dollar value of the contract or the exact numbers of switches and storage systems that have been deployed, much of which is part of the military's classified networks.) To date, the Pentagon has put in more than 4,500 ports of McData FC equipment, which supports multiple agencies, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the four armed services (see Pentagon Puts in 4,500 McData Ports).
Previously, NetCentrics had operated a few scattered SAN islands for specific applications -- such as email and file serving -- using equipment from a variety of vendors, including Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Inrange (now owned by CNT), and McData.
Now, Dixon estimates, the Army's SAN infrastructure at the Pentagon comprises more than 500 ports in a single McData-based fabric. "When we consolidated this whole effort, we were looking for scaleability and huge amounts of storage, so the EMC and McData combination was what was selected," he says. He notes that an important consideration was also long-term vendor viability: "Inrange is obviously not a big player right now... We tried to select the vendors smartly."
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