ISAF Information Services Infrastructure Fully Virtualised

 

Over the last several years, Capability Area Team (CAT7 – Core Enterprise Services) staff has worked to evolve the ISAF theatre-wide server and storage infrastructure into a modern, resilient and energy efficient capability.

 

A number of projects has been leveraged in order to realise the vision of a fully virtualised set of resilient data centres, in an incremental manner. The project started in 2008/09 with the installation of dual server rooms in HQ ISAF in Kabul. The first virtualised solution was deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 under the CENTRIX-ISAF project, which installed the initial resilient Network Interconnection Points (NIPs) connecting the US CENTRIX-ISAF capability and NATO, thus creating the single information domain now known as the Afghanistan Mission Network (AMN). From there, with the creation of the ISAF Joint Command HQ (IJC) at the Kabul International Airport (KAIA) in 2010 the concept advanced, again with a redundant server room approach.

 

The next step was to install fully virtualised server rooms in Kandahar Airfield (KAF) in March
2011. Since then the concept has spread across the theatre, utilising the AMN 2011 project.
By now, all server rooms at the Regional Commands, HQ Kabul and IJC have been virtualised and all Functional Area Services have migrated into this modern and resilient infrastructure, ahead of schedule, on 10 December 2011. Under AMN 2012 additional capacity will be provided to deal with the growing data demands in theatre.

 

 

Calculations have shown that the virtualisation of the infrastructure done in KAF, saved about EUR 50.000 (non-recurring costs), and will save approximately EUR 180.000 per year in operating costs resulting from energy savings over a predicted five year life-cycle of the capability (about EUR 950.000 of total savings). Extrapolating these efficiencies across all sites in Afghanistan, the savings are quite significant.

 

Besides energy cost reductions, the other advantages of virtualisation are that it gives commanders the ability to quickly recover from equipment failures without loss of data, and to consolidate their facilities if any potential drawdown takes effect. For future projects, deploying capability to theatre, there is no longer need to concern about the procurement of the hardware necessary to support their systems; this can be provided as a service by the Agency who will ensure that the appropriate infrastructure is available. In many instances, due to the introduction of virtualisation, there is sufficient capacity available without the need to deploy any additional hardware footprint.