The Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is migrating to a virtual desktop environment that soon will give its traveling investigators anytime, anywhere, any device access to the applications and data they need to do their jobs.

Looking to transform its IT infrastructure and better support its users and mission, while also meeting a federal datacenter consolidation mandate, the OIG’s IT team last year began to explore the idea of building out a virtual environment that eliminated the need for a costly, complex, and space-devouring storage-area network (SAN) architecture.

“Almost 1,000 of our 1,100 full-time employees are true mobile workers,” says Gary Barlet, CIO in the OIG. “Some only go to the office a few days a week. They’re investigators working on cases and auditors out at various postal facilities. The concept of having to be tied to a specific location or a specific device to do their work just doesn’t fit well in that environment.”

Barlet and his team decided that convergence technology — namely, an appliance-based server with built-in enterprise storage — was the ticket. Using a modularly scalable, self-contained black-box product developed by Nutanix, the new system reduces power consumption, cooling costs, dedicated manpower, and other expenses incurred by traditional, three-tiered SAN-based virtualization architecture, which comprises servers, switches, and storage, according to company officials.
Postal Unit Scraps Big Iron For Virtualization