United States Air Force, Capabilities Integration Environment

United States Air Force Accommodates Growth Demands Using Sun Virtualization Solution

The Capabilities Integration Environment (CIE) is part of the 643rd Electronics Systems Squadron at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. As a managed service provider to the U.S. Air Force, CIE facilitates the development and testing of software applications in various development and test environments prior to putting them into production. CIE consists of application, platform, service, integration, and performance engineers. The group emulates multiple network configurations and server infrastructures to conduct proofs of concept and evaluations of software programs.

Customer Challenges

Optimize hardware utilization
Conserve datacenter floor space, power, and cooling
Build a scalable architecture
Keep pace with growth and expand customer base

Solution

The Capabilities Integration Environment consolidated servers using the Containers feature in the Solaris 10 Operating System. Additionally, using Sun's virtualization technology, CIE was able to reduce rack space to achieve a 13:1 consolidation ratio.

Business Results

Consolidated servers using Solaris Containers
Reclaimed datacenter floor space by virtualizing servers with Sun technologies
Decreased server deployment time by more than 90% with Logical Domains (LDoms)
Cut datacenter power consumption by more than 25% and reclaimed nearly 50% of datacenter floor space with eco-responsible servers
Provided a better level of service at a decreased cost to its customers

Products and Services

Story Details

The Capabilities Integration Environment (CIE) is the center for development and testing of combat support mission application software for the U.S. Air Force prior to deployment of those applications throughout the Air Force, primarily the Global Combat Support System - Air Force (GCSS-AF). Since it began in 2003, CIE has nearly doubled its customer base annually. It initially operated under the "one server per customer" model, even though utilization on some servers reached only about 10%. In 2007, CIE came to a point where it was out of datacenter floor space and power, and as a result it could not expand its existing customer base. That's when CIE started exploring how to build a scalable architecture using fewer servers that had the ability to scale massively.

CIE is using the Solaris 10 Operating System. The Solaris 10 Operating System has built in capabilities of both Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms), which address the organization's virtualization needs. Solaris Containers make it possible to consolidate, isolate, and protect thousands of applications on a single server with one instance of the Solaris 10 OS. Solaris Containers, enable customers to consolidate servers. This allows the customer base to continue to grow providing a better level of service at a lower cost.

Logical Domains catches attention because of its ability to increase server utilization and efficiency while helping shrink the server footprint. The Sun Fire T2000 servers with LDoms fit business needs. Powered by the UltraSPARC T1 processor, the Sun Fire T2000 server saves space with its 2RU design and draws about one-fifth the power of other servers.

With Containers and LDoms, customers have the best of both worlds. Solaris Containers works especially well for WebSphere environments, which need a single operating system and a network but doesn't require device manipulation. For applications that require a full virtual machine, customers can create LDoms on the Sun Fire T2000 servers.

The limitless ZFS file system is another attractive feature of Solaris 10 OS. With ZFS, customers no longer have to worry about running out of UNIX File System space. And for backups, customers are seeing 3:1 compression on its Oracle databases. ZFS also greatly simplifies management. Anything that simplifies management is a big plus.

Through virtualization, CIE has been able to expand its customer base and remain ready for future endeavors. The project has proven the value of virtualizing everything in its infrastructure. Virtualization is now the standard, not an option.