Case in Point: NT on the High Seas

The USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) is a 95,000-ton, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the US Navy. As part of the Navy's Pacific Fleet with home port at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, the ship is home to 6000 personnel, carries 80 aircraft, and has one of the world's largest floating LANs.

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

The Vinson is using NT as part of the Navy's Information Technology for the 21^st Century (IT-21) initiative. Admiral Archie Clemens, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, first presented the IT-21 concept during a speech in January 1997. The Navy designed IT-21 to consolidate and expand existing IS programs while the Navy faces the problems of increasing workloads and decreasing budgets. The initiative consists of a set of principles and standards that the Navy will use in all future IS projects (for information about these principles 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 exploring options with the Novell network, the ship's maintenance and material management coordinator, Lt. Commander John Joyner, concluded that the Novell network fell far short of what was needed. He persuaded the ship's chain of command to adopt NT in February 1996. This decision had vision: The Pacific Fleet reached the same conclusion the following year.

Migrating to NT
The NT implementation took about four months (for Technician Bowley's views on 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 support several large multiuser computer systems, not a large number of networked personal computers. Without amenities such as drop ceilings on the aircraft carrier, running new cables would not be easy. Eventually, the IS team redesigned the network topology. The Navy placed intelligent transceivers to create several subnetworks and better route the network traffic.

"We have six main servers running a mixture of NT Server 3.51 and Server 4.0," Bowley said. "We have two Compaq servers, a ProLiant 1500 and a ProLiant 5000; the rest of the machines we put together ourselves. Most of these 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 mail to travel from the US to a ship in the Persian Gulf is not uncommon. Exchange is one of the central applications on the Gold Eagle LAN and a key standard in IT-21. "All our clients use Exchange as their email, and all our clients have Internet email, which is quite unusual on a Navy ship," Bowley said. Not everyone on the ship has access to Internet email. "Accessing email over the Internet requires a certain level of seniority, but the Gold Eagle LAN provided more Internet capability to more users than on any other ship in the Navy."