Implementation of an upgrade to the Naval Oceanographic Office information technology enterprise

The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) is a naval activity whose primary purpose is the collection and processing of data relating to the physical properties of the Earth's oceans. Inherent in this mission is a requirement to collect, store, process and archive massive quantities of data. The office has mission applications in numerous scientific disciplines including hydrography, bathymetry, physical oceanography, acoustics and geophysics. NAVOCEANO employs eight oceanographic survey vessels to support this mission, including the current-generation T-AGS 60 multidisciplinary platforms. Also, the office obtains oceanographic data from airborne data collection, drifting buoys, and remote sensing. NAVOCEANO participates in international cooperative survey agreements with foreign countries, providing an additional valuable data source. The net effect is a voluminous growth in data to be processed, stored and archived. The requirement to move in-process data files in the range of hundreds of gigabytes between workstations and servers has taxed the capabilities of the NAVOCEANO Local Area Network to its limit. This paper describes the restructuring of the NAVOCEANO information technology enterprise to meet the growth challenges that began in the late 1990s and are expected to continue over the next several years. A fundamentally different architecture is described that meets the processing and data storage/movement needs of the typical NAVOCEANO user, while reducing the strain on the NAVOCEANO backbone. In particular, the definition and implementation of a storage area network (SAN) is discussed, and the way that the implementation of SAN meets the increasing requirements is demonstrated.