United States Army Intelligence Center

U.S. Army Intelligence Center Saves $31 Million with Sun Ray Thin Client Virtual Desktop Solution

The United States Army Intelligence Center (USAIC) is the U.S. Army’s professional training school for military intelligence and provides cross-branch training to as many as 17,000 personnel annually.

Customer Challenges

Maximize classroom utilization
Improve classroom reconfiguration time
Significantly reduce hardware and operating costs
Keep IT management and maintenance costs low
Improve and ensure security of systems, applications, and data

Solution

The United States Army Intelligence Center migrated its training system from a PC-based solution to a distributed client-server solution based on 6,000 Sun Ray thin clients, Sun Ray Software and 200 Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers running 2,500 virtual machines.

Business Results

Saved $31 million in hardware costs with a Sun Ray thin client solution
Simplified administration with thin client solution; reduced IT staff by more than 90%
Cut classroom reconfiguration time from 4 days to less than 5 minutes, saving thousands of dollars in administration time

Products and Services

Story Details

USAIC trains Intelligence Professionals on the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A), the Army's primary battlefield intelligence system, which analysts use to gather and distribute intelligence information. The system is composed of many tools and applications that run on a variety of operating systems and are supported by hundreds of databases. Users access the system through a Windows desktop interface.

In 2002, USAIC operated about 40 classrooms; each had 30 to 40 computers with hard disks that were configured with applications specifically required for a particular course. Students stored their work - including test answers - on the computers' hard disks. When a class graduated, it took the IT staff several days to completely reconfigure each classroom. Reconfiguring a classroom included removing and inventorying the hard disks, wiping the disks, cleaning up all of the databases, reimaging and reinstalling the hard disks. To accomplish this process, USAIC required an IT staff of approximately 40 people. A challenge with this extensive process was ensuring that classrooms were reconfigured and made available quickly enough to meet the institution's training demands.

Another major challenge to the PC-based training system was the expense. Each PC cost anywhere between $2,000 and $5,000. With multiple removable hard disk drives per PC (one hard drive required per application trained on each PC) and software, each system could cost close to $15,000.

With growing demand to provide more courses and support more students, USAIC needed an efficient and less expensive solution to deliver training. USAIC had already started a pilot program to test a distributed client-server model in 2002. The biggest obstacle to this new model was that some applications were not designed to run multiple instances, so the pilot programs success was limited. By 2004 virtualization, which was still relatively new but had been steadily maturing and growing in popularity, proved to be the breakthrough technology that overcame this obstacle, making it appear as if each instance of the software were running on its own hardware.

With the advent of DCGS-A, and with this proven concept in hand, USAIC began looking at piloting the virtualization of DCGS-A on its existing Sun Ray thin client classroom infrastructure to offset the cost of deploying real DCGS-A systems across the campus. Fully equipped DCGS-A systems cost roughly $20,000 per student per class, and each server suite supporting just a small number of client PCs or laptops cost approximately $250,000. The cost to deploy hundreds of servers and PCs to support DCGS-A training for thousands of students was expected to climb to close to $50 million.

Using VMware ESX software, USAIC configured some of its servers as virtual machines and delivered the DCGS-A system to users on Sun Ray thin clients. After testing several vendors' thin client products, USAIC chose Sun Ray thin clients because they could support the broadest range of applications and operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris. These thin clients also posed little to no security risk because, unlike competitive products, they have no hard disk, memory, or operating system to update. And at just a few hundred dollars each, the Sun Ray thin clients were a fraction of the cost of PCs or laptops.

After a successful pilot program virtualizing DCGS-A, USAIC began searching for reliable, high-performance servers to support a virtualized production environment that could scale to support its growing student throughput. It chose the Sun Fire X4600 server because it delivered the best performance and the highest server consolidation ratio at 40:1. Other vendors' solutions would have required two to three times the number of servers. With redundant power supplies and multiple RAID arrays, the Sun Fire X4600 server is highly reliable, so downtime was not an issue. Today, USAIC runs about 200 Sun Fire X4600 servers supporting 6,000 Sun Ray thin clients in close to 170 classrooms across its campus.

Cost savings was the primary driver for this solution, and USAIC has not been disappointed with the results. In one year, USAIC saved $31 million in hardware costs alone. Labor costs have been cut significantly because virtualization and the use of Sun Ray thin clients makes it possible for the IT staff to reimage all virtual machines in a matter of minutes rather than spending several days manually wiping and reconfiguring computers. As a result, just two people rather than USAIC's 40 person IT staff can manage the entire solution. Classrooms are better utilized and easier to schedule because more classrooms are available more of the time. In addition, the Sun Ray 2 thin clients draws about 5% of the power of a typical PC, so power and cooling costs for USAIC have dropped dramatically. With the Army, the Department of Defense, and much of industry moving toward virtualized IT environments, the Chief Information Officer of USAIC says virtualization is here to stay and his organization will continue to use it, given the significant cost benefits.