Jim Laurent's Weblog

Over the past 10-15 years, my customer, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has used Solaris as a core component for its Global Command and Control System (GCCS).  GCCS is a mission critical system supporting our warfighters worldwide. To quote their web site:

GCCS-J is the principal foundation for dominant battlespace awareness, providing an integrated, near real-time picture of the battlespace necessary to conduct joint and multinational operations.

DISA chose Solaris as their deployment platform in the early 90s (Solaris 2.3 time frame) because of its open standards compliance, security, wide application availability and stability.  A recent article in Federal Computer Week indicates that Sun's relationship with DISA will continue for years to come.

DISA, according to the agency’s budget documents, plans to buy more than 120 high-powered Sun servers for GCCS-J in the next three years, including Sun Fire 1280, V890, V480, V280 and V240 servers powered by UltraSPARC processors.

As in 1992, Solaris 10 still excels in the same areas.  It is an open source OS, that runs on a wide variety of hardware platforms and provides a stable, secure platform for a wide variety of third party applications.

In addition to developing and deploying the GCCS, DISA owns and operates the DoD networks, Data Centers and other programs that use Sun hardware and software including:

• Global Combat Support System (GCSS)
• Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
• Service for the Processor Environment
• PAWS
  
• Wide Area Workflow (WAWF)
• And many other mission critical DoD systems
  

Special note

Before you wise guys out there comment that the equipment listed is old and should be retired, I'd like to point out that:

1. Government procurement documents are notoriously out of date due to the multi-year planning process they follow.
2. GCCS is currently upgrading from Solaris 2.5.1 to Solaris 8 but moving to Solaris 10 over the next year.
3. We also now have AMD (and soon Intel) based servers with which to attack the Dell components as well
   

Why should you care?

The US DoD trusts Sun products to deploy its most mission critical programs.  Sun has a long relationship with a wide variety of customer who need the utmost in security, availability and choice in their computing solutions.  Only Solaris can scale from a portable laptop computer to a 144 processor super-server with 1 TB of RAM while providing a single administrative view.