U.S. Air Force Capabilities Integration Environment Meets Extreme Growth Demands with Virtualization
 
 

U.S. Air Force Capabilities Integration Environment Meets Extreme Growth Demands with Virtualization

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U.S. Air Force (USAF) is the aerial warfare, space warfare, and cyberwarfare branch of the United States armed forces. Its Capabilities Integration Environment (CIE) is part of the electronic systems center engineering integration (ESC/ENIC) efforts at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex in Montgomery, Ala. As a managed service provider to USAF, the CIE facilitates the development and testing of applications in development and test environments prior to production.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

  • Pursue a virtualization strategy that will enable the CIE to continue to serve a growing customer base, which has doubled annually from 2003 to 2008
  • Ensure a highly scalable, reliable, and cost-effective IT environment to fulfill CIE’s mission of serving as the development and testing environment for USAF’s combat- support mission software
  • Conserve data center floor space, power, and cooling

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Used Oracle Solaris Containers—a built-in server virtualization feature of Oracle Solaris 10―and Oracle VM Server for SPARC (VMs) to deliver on its virtualization strategy and extend CIE’s ability to serve a growing USAF customer base effectively and efficiently
  • Reduced rack space by achieving consolidation ratios as high as 13:1
  • Decreased server deployment time by more than 90% with VMs
  • Cut data center power consumption by more than 25% and reclaimed nearly 50% of data center floor space with eco-responsible servers that can scale massively
  • Consolidated, isolated, and protected dozens of applications on a single server with Oracle Solaris Containers
  • Provided customers with a better level of service at lower cost―an important consideration for public sector organizations
  • Used Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise servers to save space as they draw about one-fifth the power of other servers
  • Enabled compression on CIE’s Oracle Databases for reduced physical storage utilization using Oracle Solaris ZFS, resulting in 3:1 space savings
  • Supported CIE’s Oracle E-Business Suite environment with Sun technologies, ensuring high availability and performance