Virtualizing and Centralizing Network Infrastructure at a Decentralized Federal Statistical Agency Elvera Gleaton Joseph L. Parsons

Outline of the Presentation I. Introduction II. Motivation III. Business Considerations IV. Technical Solution V. Implementation Process VI. Return on Investment VII. Lessons Learned, Challenges, Next Steps

Introduction Mission of NASS is to provide timely, accurate, and useful statistics on United States agriculture NASS conducts hundreds of surveys every year and prepares reports on United States agriculture NASS had a distributed network of servers across the United States Conducts the Census of Agriculture every five years National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)

Motivation Government Mandates ◦ Security (Centralized versus Decentralized) ◦ Green IT (reduce energy consumption) ◦ Data Center consolidation initiative ◦ Budget Efficiencies Agency Business Needs ◦ Streamline and Standardize LAN Administration ◦ Provide High Availability (continuity of operations) ◦ Increase Flexibility: Employee access anywhere, anyplace, anytime ◦ Increase integration: All users have same desktop

Business Consideration: We consolidated from 48 locations to 2 locations We consolidated 98 physical servers to 44 virtual servers

Technical Solution: The Design NASS researched and engaged technical consultation from an industry certified vendor to create virtualized design. Design consisted of: ◦ Server Software: Citrix XenServer, MS Windows 2008, MS SQL Server, ◦ Desktops: Citrix XenDesktop, Windows XP, Windows 7, MS Terminal licenses ◦ Servers: Dual Blade Chassis with High Availability (Redundancy) ◦ Storage: Replicated SANs in two locations ◦ Telecommunications: 3 level of redundancy  1 - primary (T1) 2 - backup (DSL) 3 – Disaster Recovery (Hot Spot) ◦ Monitoring Software: Alerts on all systems

NASS Centralized Design Data Center (Eastern) Data Center (Western) Mobile Smartphone/iPad Teleworker (Remote User) Field Offices Headquarters Replication, Clustered w/ Load Balancing Two server farms, clustered and replicated

Technical Solution: Secured Application Delivery

Technical Solution: One Physical PC showing 4 virtual desktops

Implementation Process Migrated two Field Offices (VA and IA) ◦ Proof Of Concept; monitored for two months watching bandwidth and application performance Pilot migration with two additional offices ◦ Finalizing migration checklist and tweaking system Conducted an external verification and validation of system (system review of all components) Migrated two Field Offices a week (pausing when there was a peak in business workload) Issues were documented, but there were no changes to the system during migration

Return on Investment Staffing ◦ Significantly reduced number of staff managing the Local Area networks ◦ Net savings of US $ million dollars Infrastructure (hardware and software) ◦ Reduce life cycle of file and print servers ◦ Net savings of US $750,000 Note: We are now reducing the number of software licenses (software is only deployed to limited desktops which are used when needed)

Lessons Learned, Challenges Deploy in stages over time ◦ Fix small issues they will increase as more users are added to system Involve and train operations and maintenance staff early ◦ Operations was slow to accept the new environment Keep stakeholders up to date ◦ Communicate often on project status to everyone, users were fearful of the unknown Develop and implement standard operating procedures ◦ Technology continues to evolve and improve, maintain a design, build, test implement model Develop a robust and always available operation ◦ Centralized system where we have users working late in the evening – maintenance windows are tight.

Next Steps Continue to improve the system ◦ Deploy AppSense maintain user profiles Continue to train operations and maintenance staff Bring in expert contractors for review and oversight of system Improve fail-over time

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