United States Army

Story Details

Every Soldier in the United States Army, including the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, is responsible for the contents of his or her OMPF. Commanders and human resource managers rely on a Soldier’s OMPF contents to make decisions concerning the Soldier’s continued service and career development, including opportunities for command, promotion and specialized training. To ensure that information in the OMPFs are correct and up to date, the Army requires Soldiers to review their files at least once a year, making corrections and adding or removing documents as needed to provide an accurate picture of their careers.

Historically, the process of reviewing and updating OMPFs depended on sending documents through the mail. This process could take up to a couple of weeks or more using bulk mail and another week or more before the documents were actually posted to a Soldier's OMPF. If FedEx or UPS is used to mail documents then the mailing process becomes very expensive.

In 1998 the Army began moving its paper and microfiche personnel records into its Personnel Electronic Record Management System (PERMS). The Army wanted to make PERMS interactive (iPERMS) so that records were available to Soldiers anywhere, anytime through a highly secure Web-based application with a unified user interface. The Army also sought a long-term storage solution because these records are required, for historical purposes, to be retained for 62 years after a Soldier’s completion of military service. These historical records are used to validate and verify veteran's benefits and entitlements and provide a source of information for security clearances.

The Army chose to deploy a clustered Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System as Web tier servers, taking advantage of shared multithreading technology for higher capacity. The iPERMS solution now has over 112 million documents available online, and receives over 111,000 new electronic documents a day. Since the document archive was deployed, it has grown by roughly 17 percent annually.

The solid hardware and software foundation provided by Sun technologies makes the system highly available. The iPERMS site gets approximately 400,000 logins a month from Soldiers seeking to access and modify their records. Due to iPERMS ease of use and availability, Soldiers are now reviewing and updating their records much more often—many of them logging in as often as once a week. As a result, the Army's personnel records are now more accurate and current than at any other time in its history. Using iPERMS, the Army's selection boards can make better, quicker human resource management decisions than ever before.

The Army worked with Sun Professional Services to design and implement reliable long-term storage and data replication with Sun StorageTek Modular Mid-Range series and Sun StorageTek Availability Suite solutions, with Solaris Cluster software. In addition, the Army is using Solaris Cluster 3.1 Software for its high-availability, disaster recovery solution and is in the process of upgrading to Solaris Cluster 3.2. With this Sun solution, the Army can restore iPERMS services to users globally within several hours in the event of a catastrophic disaster.

By implementing a highly available, easy to use, high-speed iPERMS solution, the U.S. Army can better provide for its Soldiers from the moment they join the service, throughout their careers, and into retirement.