Case in Point: NT on the High Seas

Running an NT-based network on the USS Carl Vinson

The USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) is a 95,000-ton, nuclear-powered aircraftcarrier in the US Navy. As part of the Navy's Pacific Fleet with home port atthe Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, the ship is home to6000 personnel, carries 80 aircraft, and has one of the world's largestfloating LANs.

"Keeping this baby going is quite a job," laughs LANmanager William T. Bowley, a data processing technician first class aboard theVinson. The "baby" is the Gold Eagle LAN, a Windows NT networksupporting about 600 Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95, and NT Workstationclients. All users can access some version of Microsoft Office. All shipboardpersonnel who need to keep in touch with the ship's chain of command havesystems connected into the LAN. Division officers use their systems to receiveorders from their department heads and communicate those orders to subordinates.The Navy also gathers important information affecting the administration of theship and uses the LAN to distribute this information.

The Vinson is using NT as part of the Navy's Information Technology for the21^st Century (IT-21) initiative. Admiral Archie Clemens, commanderin chief of the Pacific Fleet, first presented the IT-21 concept during a speechin January 1997. The Navy designed IT-21 to consolidate and expand existing ISprograms while the Navy faces the problems of increasing workloads anddecreasing budgets. The initiative consists of a set of principles and standardsthat the Navy will use in all future IS projects (for information about theseprinciples and standards, see the sidebar, "Information Technology for the 21^st Century," page 200). One important standard is NT, which, with Microsoft Exchange, will be the backbone of a new Defense Department-wide Defense Messaging System. This system will eventually carry all classified and nonclassified messages throughout the Department of Defense.

"We were among the first to adopt NT," says Bowley. Before NT,the Vinson ran a Novell network supporting about 150 users. After exploringoptions with the Novell network, the ship's maintenance and material managementcoordinator, Lt. Commander John Joyner, concluded that the Novell network fellfar short of what was needed. He persuaded the ship's chain of command to adoptNT in February 1996. This decision had vision: The Pacific Fleet reached thesame conclusion the following year.

Migrating to NT
The NT implementation took about four months (for Technician Bowley's viewson implementing the Gold Eagle LAN, see the sidebar, "An Interview with William T. Bowley," page 201). Growing the ship's network was not easy. " The cabling in place was not really designed for any kind of modern network,"says Bowley. The ship has a thickwire Ethernet backbone designed to supportseveral large multiuser computer systems, not a large number of networkedpersonal computers. Without amenities such as drop ceilings on the aircraftcarrier, running new cables would not be easy. Eventually, the IS teamredesigned the network topology. The Navy placed intelligent transceivers tocreate several subnetworks and better route the network traffic.

"We have six main servers running a mixture of NT Server 3.51 andServer 4.0," Bowley said. "We have two Compaq servers, a ProLiant 1500and a ProLiant 5000; the rest of the machines we put together ourselves. Most ofthese are at least 100MHz machines."

Making Messaging a Top Priority
Because letter mail can be a significant problem for ships on deployment,the team tried to improve on ship-to-shore messaging. Waiting two weeks for mailto travel from the US to a ship in the Persian Gulf is not uncommon. Exchange isone of the central applications on the Gold Eagle LAN and a key standard inIT-21. "All our clients use Exchange as their email, and all our clientshave Internet email, which is quite unusual on a Navy ship," Bowley said.Not everyone on the ship has access to Internet email. "Accessing emailover the Internet requires a certain level of seniority, but the Gold Eagle LANprovided more Internet capability to more users than on any other ship in theNavy."

Every day, the Exchange server handles between 3000 and 7000 messages. In24 hours, the crew typically transmits about 1000 messages off ship and receivesan equal number from land. To support all the messaging traffic, the Navyreplaced the Vinson's existing Exchange server, a homegrown 100MHz Pentiumserver that had 64MB of RAM and 4GB of storage, with a new Compaq 200MHz PentiumPro server with 396MB of RAM and an 18GB RAID array.

"We're really proud of the new Exchange server because migrating fromMicrosoft Mail to Microsoft Exchange during the middle of a Western Pacific/Persian Gulf deployment was quite interesting," laughs Bowley. "Whenwe were on deployment in the Persian Gulf, we were one of the few ships in theNavy that maintained an Internet mail link with the US. To say that this benefitwas an incalculable morale boost would probably be an understatement," saidBowley. The ship sent and received more than 5000 Internet messages a day whilein the Persian Gulf. In all, the Vinson processed nearly 1.2 million emailmessages during deployment in the Gulf.

The upgrade plan called for migrating one department from MS Mail toExchange every week. The IS team delivered a set of upgrade instructions to allusers. Of course, not every user followed all the instructions as carefully asBowley would have liked. The team was able to handle some problems over thephone and use tools such as Systems Management Server (SMS). However, manyproblems required visiting various sites around the ship. The ship's vast sizeand intense level of activity while deployed made for some long days. "Ifyou're a network administrator, you know what I mean. I think a lot of my grayhair is the result of that migration," says Bowley.

While at sea, the Vinson's network communicates with the US via the CA 3Challenge Athena satellite system. The ship routes communications through Hawaiito Florida, and then to the rest of the country. The system performs well, androutinely permits email to travel from the ship to its destination in two tofour hours.

At times during deployment in the Persian Gulf, the ship experiencedtransmission rates of four minutes. "Sometimes, it was almost chat-like,"said Bowley. "We had a very generous bandwidth allocation because theship's chain of command realized the importance of giving the crew the abilityto communicate with their families."

In addition to email access, Web access is important. The Navy wanted toexpand the network and provide more services, such as Web access. "I'd sayabout 200 of our clients run Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.About 50 of those clients have complete Web access; the rest are restrictedthrough Microsoft Proxy Server," said Bowley. Users on the ship regularlyaccess Web sites such as USA Today, CNN, Navy Online, and The Bureau of NavalPersonnel. The Navy Personnel site is particularly important because it containsthe latest instructions, policies, and advancement exam results. "The newssites were extremely popular while we were deployed to the Arabian Gulf as partof Operation Desert Strike," reports Bowley. "The Web access permittedthe crew to keep in touch with current events as they were happening, and thiscapability contributed very positively to morale."

Looking Ahead to the 21st Century
What's next for the Gold Eagle LAN? The Vinson's IS team is busy preparingto migrate many clients to NT Workstation 4.0 with Office 97. They're alsodeploying a corporate-style intranet aboard ship. Each department will have aset of Web pages for instructions and information. The IS team will use AdobeAcrobat and other Web publishing tools to create links to other pages on and offship. "One department has already created an Adobe-based chain of command,important instructions, and standard operating procedures, all in hyperlinkedtext with imbedded photographs," said Bowley.

The USS Carl Vinson is a strong case for the IT-21 concept because the shipis deploying standard technology quickly and to great effect. NT has helped inmany areas. "For us, it was a quantum leap," says Bowley, "Idon't know how we did our jobs before."