Enterprise Consolidation for DoD Using AdvancedTCA

Abstract

The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA) standard for information technology (IT) equipment has been proposed as ideal for use in the extreme environments experienced by military units, designed specifically to meet the extremes of high temperatures. Despite the fact that AdvancedTCA components are designed specifically to provide an overall availability (AO) in excess of 0.99999 and delivered ready-made to meet requirements for modularity and scalability under the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), the Department of Defense has been fairly slow to adopt AdvancedTCA as a standard for its IT programs. At least one of the reasons for this slow adoption is that AdvancedTCA servers generally perform slower than commodity IT servers, which is thought to result in poor system performance. After modeling an enterprise IT environment and simulating network traffic using the OPNET Modeler tool, the authors demonstrated that there is no performance degradation in using AdvancedTCA servers for the consolidation effort in comparison to commodity IT equipment. The authors used analysis of variance and Kruskal-Wallis multivariate data analysis techniques to show that there is no significant degradation in the overall performance of the system when using AdvancedTCA servers. In order to conduct this comparison, the authors developed a system-level performance benchmark (system goodput GS) to show that individual component benchmarks are not accurate predictors of system-level performance. The benefits of AdvancedTCA in terms of ruggedization, quality, cost savings, MOSA compliance, and increased AO far outpace any perceived performance gap.