Headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base near Cocoa Beach, Fla., "the Wing" is the Department of Defense’s East Coast Spaceport. It supports and manages space launch programs for the Department of Defense, NASA and commercial entities. These programs generate significant amounts of data, including launch photos, videos, weather maps, launch schedules and space shuttle flight information, all of which must be backed up, or stored to protect against data loss.

"The threat of hurricanes and flooding on the Florida coast makes it absolutely critical that we backup our data," said Glenn Exline, manager of advanced technologies at the Wing. "With our previous storage system, backup took up to 14 hours every day. With our SANs, we’ve reduced that to only two hours a day. That’s about an 86 percent reduction in time."

The SAN installations also helped the Wing consolidate its network from
52 servers to 35, simplifying server management. With fewer servers in its network, the Wing will spend less to refresh its servers as part of the replacement cycle.

The Wing has installed two SANs, one located at Patrick Air Force Base and the other at Cape Canaveral. Each includes Dell/EMC storage arrays and PowerEdge 2650 servers. Together, the SANs manage 3.5 terabytes of data.

This summer, the Wing plans to use fiber optics to connect the two SANs at Patrick AFB and Cape Canaveral AFS, which are located about 25 miles apart. This will enable each site to back up the other’s data.