The U.S. Marine Corps plans to take server virtualization software into war — literally — as part of an effort to improve the way it deploys IT on the battlefield. “The Marine Corps has always packed stuff up and taken it to the field — that is not new,” said Maj. Carl Brodhun, the USMC’s project officer for enterprise virtualization. “The ability to cram 35 applications into five or six physical hosts is relatively new.” Marines in the field can’t count on having stable, high-capacity network connections, Brodhun noted, adding that “being able to compress a high number of applications into a constrained footprint” would reduce their connectivity needs.
A Marine corporal uses the Internet to send e-mail at Al Asad Airbase in Iraq. The USMC, which has about 12,000 x86-based servers, is adopting an enterprisewide approach to virtualization via a deal with VMware Inc. The project includes a plan to reduce the USMC’s current total of about 300 data centers to 30 facilities plus 100 “mobile platforms.” A major goal of the virtualization strategy is increasing system availability and operational continuity, Brodhun said. For instance, when IT workers want to take a server offline for maintenance now, they have to do the work at night and issue a half-dozen or so warning notices starting 30 days in advance. With virtualization, they could simply move guest systems and their applications to another server, Brodhun said.