Navy Marine Corps Intranet Goes Green
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 10.10.08
Navy Marine Corps Intranet is Second Only to the Internet
The Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) has more than 660,000 active users, only the Internet is larger. It has around 50 classified and unclassified server farms, for a total of thousands of servers.
The U.S. Department of Defense, to comply with federal "green" computing mandates, has been trying to reduce the footprint of this intranet, and so far the results are promising. Read on for more details.
Virtualization & Consolidations of Servers
Thus far, the program has consolidated 2,000 servers down to 300, with another 2,000 servers left to consolidate. When the project is complete, there will have been an 8:1 consolidation of servers in the system, and it will save the military an estimated $800,000 per year in power and cooling costs — a 65% reduction.
Virtualization at NMCI has already taken the equivalent of 2,550 cars off the road and prevented 6,800 tons of carbon emissions, based on an average of 4 tons of CO2/year per server.
Not bad on the IT side, but we wish the rest of the military would look closely at its environmental impact.
Via EDS
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion: Renewable Ocean Power & Air Conditioning Research Receives Federal Funding
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Awesome Bicycle Kung Fu!
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8:1 is pretty damn good!
With that said, I'd like to know how much energy is wasted by their ridiculous attempt at securing and managing workstations. I'm a contractor, and I spend no less than an hour each day waiting on the machine to boot, shutdown, reboot, etc., due to all of the horribly bloated software they keep on the machines.
If everyone experiences this level of frustration, multiplied by those 660k users, that probably adds up to a lot of wasted time, energy and money. I know I am not a happy NMCI user, regardless of whether or not it's green.
Talk about green-washing! People who destroy are not by any definition green. You can't hurt whales with sonar, blow up beaches, and pollute like the US Navy does every single day and somehow, all the sudden, call them GREEN!!!
I'm sure that the Navy has lots of bloated PCs littering their landscape but they are also one of the largest buyers of Sun's SunRay desktops which are extremely efficient and secure.
No where did the article call the navy green. They called its network green.