Wyle has supported many client’s server and network consolidation efforts to help them achieve economies of scale, improved security, and reduced maintenance and support costs through centralization of hardware, software, and personnel. The Department of Energy, NOAA Office of Research and Applications (now the Center for Satellite Applications and Research -- STAR), the U.S. Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), the Air Force Combat Climatology Center (AFCCC), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) are clients assisted in their Server and Network consolidation efforts.
For the Department of Energy, Wyle staff consolidated approximately 35 servers into one IBM Xeon blade server running VMWare’s Virtual Infrastructure Software. Staff also assisted the U.S. Air Force AFMC in an ongoing effort to implement the AFMC Regional Architecture Plan to consolidate computer and network operations at 17 Main Operating Bases and other geographically separated units into four regional hub sites. In 2004, in just four weeks, Wyle Information Systems helped NOAA Office of Research and Applications consolidate and reconfigure 230 Windows, Linux and UNIX servers on five LAN subnets into two subnets. Wyle staff also consolidated seven Windows servers to two for the U.S. Air Force AFCCC station in Asheville, N.C. in 2004, consolidating two California offices into its existing DOE Chicago office WAN in 2004 and consolidated three WANs from DOE HQ to three DOE sites in Colorado to a single WAN connection serving each of the facilities in 2005.
Wyle provides MAJCOM-centric management of servers throughout the AFMC Enterprise. This is part of the AF initiative of server consolidation implementation of an AF Information Enterprise (AIE). Ensuring fully capable and demonstrated AF core competencies in a network- and information-centric joint battle space, working in concert with HQ AFMC to ensure that AFMC users have access to the data needed, in the required format, wherever and whenever requested. Planning efforts for this vision included a strategy for server consolidation that facilitates needed environment to reach desired AF goals. AFMC end-state objectives are to consolidate servers following an architecture design that is most efficient and provides the best performance to our diverse customer base. Wyle staff analyze the Network Operations Security Center’s (NOSC) server consolidation architecture to capture lessons learned for accessibility and interoperability, structuring a phased approach to accomplish consolidating services and implementing MAJCOM-centric administrative services.
For the TTB, Wyle implemented consolidation efforts through virtualization, replaced physical servers with virtual servers at the TTB Headquarters and the National Revenue Center. Ultimately executing 41 virtual servers, retiring 17 physical servers with a target of reduction in the physical server footprint of 50 per cent for the organization. This will result in substantial recurring savings through significantly reducing the need for space, power, cooling and hardware refresh. An added benefit to server virtualization is the improved TTB disaster recovery capabilities achieved using the high availability features found in server virtualization.
In support of U.S. Census Bureau IT Strategy initiatives, Wyle transitioned more than 250 standard Wintel stand alone servers and associated services to virtual server environments configured under VMware on IBM Blade technology for lab and production systems alike. The implementation of network analysis and test tools such as latency generators was also configured.
Along with the migration from VMware and Blade servers, For Census Wyle staff consolidated or transitioned more than 30 different domains into one active directory forest, implemented standards for server builds and object naming, implemented National Institute Standards and Technology suggested security settings to ensure systems met the guidelines. The Wyle team designed, implemented and maintains the Census Bureau Lightweight Directory Access Protocol implementation for application authentication, also implementing Novell's Identity Management solution to keep accounts synchronized between multiple directory solutions.