Perhaps one of the first real tests of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet contract came after the terrorist attack on the Pentagon Sept. 11.
With an estimated 70 percent of the Navys space inside the Pentagon gone and most of the Navy Communications Center and Navy Budget Office destroyed, the Navy turned to Electronic Data Systems Corp. and the NMCI Strike Force to quickly rebuild classified and unclassified networks in temporary office space in the Washington Navy Yard, Navy Annex and National Center 2, in Crystal City, Va.
EDS received an initial estimate of the number of NMCI seats that would need to be rebuilt by Wednesday night after the attack. On Thursday morning, EDS sent out nine tractor-trailers from its St. Louis facility loaded with 860 portables, 335 desk-side computers and enough cabling for five floors of office space. At the same time, Cisco Systems Inc. delivered the switches and routers necessary to complete the network.
The equipment arrived Friday morning, and NMCI Strike Force members went to work loading the NMCI software on about 1,000 machines, officials said. By Sunday, about 50 PCs were operational, along with a new server farm for the Navys budget office. Restoring the software and data from the budget office was a high priority because the budget was due Oct. 6.
At the same time, two-and-a-half floors of office space were wired from scratch, Dell Computer Corp. docking stations were connected to the network, and more than 450 portable NMCI seats were loaded with the NMCI software.
The first two floors of office space were ready to move into by Monday.
By that Wednesday, reconstruction efforts were complete, with some 700 people back online.
“The terrorist attack showed now more than ever [that] a concept like this is needed. We were fortunate we didnt lose people; we had no injuries—just equipment. It was not a setback, though,” said EDS Rick Rosenburg, program client executive for the NMCI Strike Force, in Herndon, Va.