ITALIAN ARMY

CHALLENGE

When speaking of the institutions involved in the protection of the citizens, everyone knows the importance of effective, fast and safe services.The Italian Army has always boasted of a powerful ICT infrastructure, capable of connecting all Armed Forces headquarters throughout the country, as well isolated areas around the world where military operations take place. The necessary resources for data conservation and processing proved adequate to ensure service efficiency but expensive from a management point of view, since they were geographically scattered and filled with proprietary applications that are difficult to integrate and maintain.

Numerous servers were scattered in barracks and administrative offices across Italy; storage capacity and applications’ functionalities operated through semi-automatic mechanisms. Management and maintenance costs, ranging from the occupation of physical space to server usage, from energy costs to the complex interaction between different systems, became increasingly patentFor these reasons, the Italian Army felt the need to update its ICT infrastructure and IT services.

NEXT GENERATION DATA CENTER — DRIVERS
LOW USAGE OF HARDWARE RESOURCES
SATURATION OF PHYSICAL SPACE
GROWING OF ENERGY COST
MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE COSTS
NON OPTIMIZED SOFTWARE COSTS

3 large Data Centers and 11 additional small Data Centers have been distributed in the country

SOLUTION

The evolution path taken by the Army found Italtel as a leader in technology infrastructure renewal, through a "turnkey" project that resulted in the building of two Next Generation Data Centers, allowing it to reduce the number of physical servers and network complexity.
1
Design
2
Deployment of 2 Data Centers
3
Wining and buildings compliancy to the standards
4
Software platform virtualization
5
Applications migration
6
Army intranet implementation, consolidating the major services, such as email and other applications of strategic interest
MAPPA

These activities were followed by the building of a third data center at the CSIE (Army Computer Systems Center), focusing on logistics, and by the creation of 11 additional mini Data Centers in six different locations throughout the country, which paved the way, in complete safety, for further Cloud Computing possibilities. Measures were then taken to consolidate the Army Management Information System (SIGE) and military storage protocols, which have been entirely virtualized and centralized in these new infrastructures.

Throughout this project, Italtel provided continuous technical assistance and guaranteed its support through training activities agreed upon with the customer.

BENEFITS

SIMPLIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE
IMPROVEMENT OF PERFORMANCES
NUMBER OF SERVERS REDUCTION
IMPROVEMENT OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE SERVICES PROVIDED
VIRTUALIZATION
MAXIMUM SCALABILITY AND FLEXIBILITY OF IT RESOURCES

TECHNICAL DETAILS

To provide Army with a high level of innovation and to allow a renovation process that can take advantage of Cloud Computing, the two Data Centers have been implemented using the best technologies available on the market.
The reference technology Partner for the design of the solution is Cisco. In particular, Italtel adopted Cisco products of the UCS (Unified Computing Systems) and NEXUS family, and high capacity next-generation switches created for environments such as Data Centers.

CONCLUSION

Italtel has demonstrated the ability to manage complex and strategically important projects: it is a privileged partner for all customers who wish to upgrade their technology infrastructure to next-generation data centers.

Read more about Italtel Data Center and Virtualization Solution

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