Army Begins Consolidating Enterprise Application Servers.

The article reports that the U.S. Army is heeding lessons learned from corporate America by building data centers to consolidate local enterprise application servers now running at hundreds of Army bases nationwide. Joe Capps, director of enterprise systems technology activity at the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command in Arlington, Virginia, said the move is expected to cut costs and make Army operations more efficient. The plan, announced earlier this month at an Army IT conference, will start later this year with an effort over 12 to 18 months to create two data centers, each hooked up to four bases, Capps said. Over the next four years, all application servers running at all U.S. bases will be networked together in up to six data centers. The servers to be consolidated include machines running applications such as logistics and business processing software. The initial effort includes two data centers to ensure redundancy. Local servers running applications used for research and development and for location- specific needs won't be included in the consolidation. That will allow bases to retain high-processing capabilities for their individual research.