The U.S. Army National Guard is spending $10.5 million over three years to deploy SANs in all 50 states and four U.S. territories where it has operations. The aim: to consolidate the servers that house all its personnel and logistics data, in order to reduce the complexity and cost of managing this infrastructure (see US Army Recruits EMC).
The National Guard employs 350,000 people across the U.S., with the dual mission of providing support to individual states during disasters such as floods or earthquakes as well as supporting the federal army. Troops from the National Guard are currently deployed in Afghanistan and Bosnia.
To provide better administration of its records management, finance, logistics, contracts, and email to its staff nationwide, the National Guard plans to centralize 200 terabytes of data storage on EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Symmetrix equipment. The ultimate goal is to create one corporate data center and one disaster recovery facility for the entire organization over five years.
The consolidation project will happen in three phases and is being carried out by Northrup Grumman Corp., a global aerospace and defense company and the prime contractor in the project. It is completing phase one of the project in three or four states each week and expects to finish the job by October 2002.
The first phase involves pooling the storage in each state on to the EMC Symmetrix platform. The National Guard had one EMC Symmetrix array at its headquarters in Arlington, Va., and will purchase 54 more under the new contract. Eight other vendors submitted requests for proposal (RFPs), but Larry Borkowski, the National Guard's chief of automation, operations, and plans, says EMC fit the government's requirements on price and the ability to tie together disparate servers from Compaq, Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT).
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