• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Training Network Contingency Plans Tested During Hurricane Season

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS100813-15
8/13/2010

By Ed Barker, Naval Education and Training Command Public Affairs

PENSACOLA, Fla. (NNS) -- A continuity of operations (COOP) exercise testing the ability to shift the U.S. Navy's Training Network (TRANET) operations in response to natural or man-made disasters concluded Aug. 1, with the reconstitution of operations from Great Lakes, Ill. back to Pensacola, Fla.

The entire network capability for Navy eLearning (NeL), Corporate Automated Resource Information System budget applications and service oriented architecture web services suite were shifted from the Saufley Field network server farm in Pensacola to the contingency server farm at Naval Station Great Lakes and back again.

"Testing and flexing our ability to use COOP processes is vital to maintaining service to the Navy in spite of what Mother Nature may have in mind," said Capt. Katharine Reed, Naval Education and Training Command, command information officer. "What started as a scheduled test turned into a potential real-world scenario as Tropical Storm Bonnie headed toward the Gulf Coast, and the test was expanded from one to two weeks. Fortunately for everyone, Bonnie never became a hurricane."

An evaluation of the number of courses that were successfully accessed and completed by fleet Sailors during the COOP exercise indicated that the test went very smoothly. A normal volume of activity was recorded during the exercise period of July 18-31.

"This is our second COOP exercise this year and we continue to refine and improve our processes, including learning valuable lessons about how to make our methods and procedures better," said David Schisler, director of operations and infrastructure for the NETC command information officer. "Feedback from our learning sites indicated that they were experiencing normal training days – the fact that nobody noticed that we had switched to our COOP servers was the best possible result."

On any given day throughout the NETC enterprise, an interruption in training due to infrastructure failure has the potential to affect 30,000 students, including 20,000 Sailors and Marines in electronic classrooms.

"In September of 2004, Hurricane Ivan demonstrated the need for geographic diversity in our information technology processing facilities as Ivan's effects took TRANET down for 36 hours," added Schisler. "Our improved current failover (transfer) capability to the Great Lakes servers allows zero impact to training."

"In addition to refining our COOP processes, much has changed and improved with regard to our Integrated Learning Environment infrastructure within the last couple of years," said Reed. "We have performed 'tech refresh', replacing old computer workstations and laptops with new hardware on more than 12,000 workstations in NETC classrooms. In addition, a third of the server hardware has been modernized. Our TRANET has tripled its caching capacity, dramatically increasing performance at our learning sites."

For more information on Navy eLearning or to visit the NeL catalog, click on the Navy Knowledge Online website at https://www.nko.navy.mil and after logging in, click on 'Navy e-learning online courses' under the 'learning' tab on the top right of the page.