Defence Force opts for lower capacity

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Defence Force's new information technology infrastructure will be able to run at only 60 per cent of capacity if either the Porirua or planned Auckland data centres fall over.

Army, Navy and Air Force IT staff came under the new joint information service agency on July 1, and the Defence Force plans to consolidate the services' 10 data centres into two by Christmas.

Defence chief information officer Ron Hooton said the Porirua and Devonport data centres would not have enough capacity for full disaster recovery.

"It depends on what you are willing to pay for, and the choice this organisation made is it didn't want to invest in total recovery," he said.

"If something happens we can cut people down to minimum access and find other ways to do things. We don't have unlimited funds."

He said 462 users had successfully piloted the technology required for the new infrastructure, and approval had been given for the complete expansion to 9000 users on 7500 desktops.

They would use Citrix thin client technology, allowing the services to get more life out of existing PCs and laptops.

Hooton said that although the plan originally called for about 240 Hewlett Packard blade servers running Microsoft Windows 2003, "the performance we have been getting from Citrix has been so good we will be able to get way with less than that".

The data centres also house EMC storage area networks. Open source doesn't get a look in.

"We are a Microsoft organisation," said Hooton. "All our skills lie in the Microsoft environment and there are military inter-operability reasons for that."

Much of the projected cost savings came from application consolidation across the services. Integrating SAP and the Defence Force's 15-year-old human resources system meant improved recruitment planning.


"That is complex - if you want to build a colonel, you have to start with quite a few entry level officers and work out where to post people so they get well-rounded careers."

Engineering will be consolidated on SAP, and Defence is also spending more than $3 million with Fujitsu to build a secure email messaging system based in Microsoft Outlook.

Hooton said Fujitsu had built a similar system for the British Army, and Defence could draw on that expertise.

The Devonport data centre was not ready for the launch of the new agency because of problems getting enough power into the naval base, but it should be running by the end of next month.

About 35 of the agency's 153 staff will be in Auckland, 75 in Wellington and the balance in the regions doing basic support.


There have been some grumblings in the services about the forced consolidation, but Hooton, a former Countrywide Bank chief information officer, said the move was necessary.

"When you make gutsy calls, not everyone is going to agree, and one or two people are bound to be disappointed," he said.

"The Chief of Defence has a strategy of three services, one force.

"We acknowledge each of the services has an individual culture and needs, but they have common elements and there is no point in having three systems where we can have one."