Geo–Replicator for US Army.
Improving access to information across military units in the field.
US Army uses Infonic Geo-Replicator for server replication in areas with low bandwidth and intermittent telecommunications. Some successful implementations are:-
Infonic’s Geo-Replication technologies hold a Certificate of Networthiness (CoN) from the US Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM). Read more.
Army Sustainment Command
The Army Sustainment Command’s mission is clear and compelling: Improve logistics support to troops on the battlefield. Among other things, ASC offers field support with brigade logistics support teams which identify and resolve equipment and maintenance problems, as well as materiel readiness issues for combatant commands and Materiel Management support which includes issuing, maintaining and managing Theater-Provided Equipment (TPE) in combat theaters, and Left-Behind Equipment (LBE) that can be made available to non-deployed units for training.
ACS successfully used SharePoint 2007 to enable local collaboration. The challenge they faced was they had four remote regions along with the Headquarters in Rock Island, Illinois all using SharePoint 2007, but each with their own active directory. The next step in this project is to establish SharePoint portals in all five of the regions: Rock Island, Hawaii, South East Asia, Europe and Korea . All were set up to reflect the needs of their remote site, and none could communicate with Headquarters, let alone each other.
EPOK and Infonic collaborated with ASC to develop a quick solution to support this critical war time command. EPOK set up a stand alone server alongside each remote server to handle the demands of user authentication enforcement of document access rights that are inherent in SharePoint 2007. Once these are handled between the EPOK server and the Remote Server, this server appears as one, and open two way collaboration between all remote servers and headquarters now occurs.
Infonic Geo-Replicator is an integral part of this solution. Instead of replicating each entire document or database to HQ or a remote site, Geo-Replicator through its unique byte level differencing only replicates the updated bytes of information through low-bandwidth transmissions, allowing for quicker access to information. This solution gives local SharePoint portals, no matter which region you are in, equal access to all information in any portal.
Single views of all documents are presented to logisticians, as the remote silos have been eliminated and soldiers in the field are getting the right equipment for the job in a timely, cost effective manner. This replication technology provides tremendous feedback from the field on the performance of supplies and equipment.
Benefits of Geo-Replicator:
Faster Access to SharePoint in very remote areas of the world
Access to more up-to-date portal content
Dramatic reduction in the cost of data bandwidth
Improved access to logistics documentation
Improved collaboration between field based soldiers and equipment manufacturers
Low bandwidth connectivity
Infonic Geo-Replicator employs unique Epsilon differencing technology to achieve ASC’s objective of providing up to date information to each of its remote servers. Epsilon is a patented differencing engine that enables the central portal server to keep an accurate record of the content on every other portal server in the network. Epsilon then uses this knowledge to extract the differences, at the byte level, from any new documentation created within the portal, and then only sends those differences to the other servers in the network. This enables the entire portal deployment to be kept up to date with very limited demands on network bandwidth. With Epsilon, no information, or byte pattern, is ever sent from one server to another server twice. This enables dramatic reduction (around 90%) in the volume of data that needs to be sent across the network to keep all portal servers up to date.
USARCENT: Atlanta, Georgia
USARCENT is the primary logistics element for all land forces in the Central command which encompasses primarily the geography of Northern Africa and Central and Southwest Asia.
It currently has two major data centers: one at Ft. McPherson and one in Kuwait. Databases in each location need to be synchronized so that logisticians can coordinate and have the best materiels available for the war fighter. SharePoint 2007 allows them to enhance their business process and gain the visibiility they need to do this, but limited or no satellite bandwidth has prevented the synchronization of the two siloed servers.
Infonic’s Geo-Replicator has solved the problem by allowing only repeated data to be transmitted. The patented Epsilon software compresses the data so that as much as 90% does not need to be transmitted: only the bytes that have changes are sent. This solution reduces latency, increases speed of transfer and can increase the size of data files to be transferred. USARCENT is looking to roll out Infonic Geo-replicator for SharePoint 2007 on a third server in the very near future.
Geo-Replicator Offline Demonstrator
Click here to download a free standing SharePoint offline demonstrator and see how collaboration can be achieved without 24x7 connectivity
For more infomation please contact: dc.sales@infonic.com or Enquire Online.
