Smooth Sailing for NT- Navy switches from Unix to NT.
Michelle:
Looking good for NT.
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Smooth sailing for NT
The U.S. Navy embarks on an initiative to migrate applications from Unix to NT
By Bob Brewin
n the event of a crisis, the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet doesn't need to leave the stateroom of his ship sailing off the coast of South Korea to determine the location of U.S., allied, or foreign forces in his area of operations. Instead, on board the USS Blue Ridge, Vice Adm. Walter Doran sits down at his workstation hooked into the ship's Secret Local Area Network, pops open the C2PC (Command and Control PC) application, and views a smart map. This gives him near real-time tracking data of friendly and potentially enemy ships, aircraft, and troops in the immediate area of the Korean peninsula.
Doran's NT workstation is one of the 350 clients installed on the Blue Ridge this year as part of a Navy-wide plan to outfit all its major ships and bases worldwide with NT clients, networked to a mix of NT and Unix servers. The Navy plans to use this global NT network to run its mission-critical command and control system, installing the new architecture on far-flung vessels such as the Blue Ridge and the USS Kitty Hawk carrier battle group and the USS Belleau Wood amphibious ready group, all of which have their home port in Japan.
The Navy is taking part in a departmentwide migration of its applications from Unix to NT. The Defense Department two years ago approved NT as part of its Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment (COE), which defines the standard software platform for command and control applications. COE originally was a Unix-only platform.
"With this network, we are now compliant with command and control systems being used throughout the Department of Defense," says Doran. "It gives us a tremendous boost in our ability to work with other services."
Cost, training, and ease of use lie behind the Navy's decision to migrate its worldwide network architecture to NT, according to Rear Adm. John Gauss, commander of the San Diego-based Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), which developed Global Command and Control System-Maritime (GCCS-M), the Navy version of the Defense Department's new command and control system, and which manages its Navy-wide deployment.
The Navy can buy a 200MHz PC for far less than a Unix workstation, says Gauss. Capt. Roger Hull, the SPAWAR command and control system program manager before he retired earlier this year, estimated that by moving to NT, the Navy could cut its costs to be from one-tenth to one-quarter that of Unix workstations, with overall savings to the Navy in the $20 million range.
Training sailors to use and maintain PC-based systems is "much easier" than doing so in Unix, according to Gauss, since even casual users now have familiarity with the Windows NT-based environment. Andrew Cox, a SPAWAR systems engineer, says, "we are probably seeing a better return on our investment for user training on NT [than Unix] ... When you go over to NT, users are just more familiar with it, reducing the time we spend training them."
The Blue Ridge had a similar experience with its staff users after the NT network went on line. "On the user side, it is a lot easier for someone to sit down and start using different applications [because of the Windows interface]," says Cmdr. Pat Cole, the Seventh Fleet's information systems officer, "reducing the amount of training and dedicated support we have to provide to the staff." But, Cole added, the ship has had to deal with a "not-too-steep learning curve" for its systems administrators. "We're still in the early stages of training our techies ... and that's a little more problematic."
While some commercial and even government users have taken a cautious approach to rolling out NT because of security and stability concerns, the Navy has no such fears. Before deploying GCCS-M on NT to operational users such as the Seventh Fleet, Gauss says, the Navy put the system through an exercise of "epic proportions" to test its stability and reliability. Bryan Scurry, the SPAWAR test director, says that during the test the NT-based GCCS-M ran "for more than 1,000 hours, and it passed with an operational availability of over 95 percent. In a couple of instances, that availability hit 98 percent."
While professing faith in the security of NT, SPAWAR found out that it takes a lot of work to properly configure the operating system for the truly secure environment required to protect real-world national security information.
"NT right out of the box is inherently insecure, so we made sure all the "hot fixes" are loaded. We've taken a defense-in-depth concept to make sure it is locked down," SPAWAR's Cox says. This approach includes immediately disabling the notoriously weak Posix software that comes with NT, controlling access to routers, and putting in firewalls, he says.
Anyone migrating to NT, Cox says, needs to "recognize that NT is not a secure system up front and then engineer a secure environment. We have a seven meg[abyte] document that describes all the things" needed to ensure that NT systems throughout the Navy have the fixes and patches needed to operate in one of the most mission-critical environments in the world.
Two months into the NT shakedown cruise, the Seventh Fleet's Cole says the problems that the Navy has encountered are "what happens when you install any new, complex system. I do know that our users are better off than they were under the old system ... and already my systems administrators are impressed on how much easier it is to administer [NT] than our previous system."
About the author
Bob Brewin is an Editor-at-Large for Federal Computer Week. |
