Gregory Garcia directs the U.S. Army Information Technology Agency (ITA), which is in charge of the Pentagon’s move to a virtualized desktop environment. He recently sat down with Federal Times Editor Steve Watkins to discuss the current state of the effort and coming goals.
Some excerpts:
What is the current status and next steps of your ongoing desktop virtualization initiative?
We started this with a pilot with Joint Staff probably about a year and a half ago. And their desire was to have a more maintainable, less costly desktop capability for all the Joint Staff, both on the classified and unclassified side here in the National Capital Region. We’re now in the final production run, trying to get their goal of 80 percent of the Joint Staff having VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] capability.
Bonus: Thomas Sasala, CTO of the Army’s IT Agency, will discuss the challenges and key lessons learned in establishing a virtual desktop environment within the DoD, in a special free webcast on March 10. Click here for more.
Do you see this rolling out to the entire Army desktop population?
I’ll say probably not, but this could roll out to every single user in the Pentagon, whether they’re Joint Staff, Army, Air Force, Navy, OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] or Fourth Estate folks. Because one of the things we learned in the rollout of VDI is the importance of throughput and making sure that all the issues of latency are addressed.
Thomas Sasala, CTO of the Army’s IT Agency, will provide an update on DoD’s virtualization efforts in a special free webcast on March 10. Click here for more.
