ARPC makes progress improving system reliability

by Lt. Col. Belinda Petersen
Air Reserve Personnel Center Public Affairs

8/8/2014 - BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. -- Systems, such as the virtual Personnel Center-Guard and Reserve, experience severe spikes in personnel program usage during the first weekend of every month as Citizen Airmen and Guardsmen perform required duty. As a result of these spikes, vPC-GR crashed almost without fail. Such hindrances have caused world-wide headaches until recent efforts by Air Reserve Personnel Center officials helped improve system reliability and proved it by keeping vPC-GR up for three unit training assembly weekends in a row.

"On the first full weekend of any month, [parts] of the system would overheat and vPC-GR would go down for the rest of the weekend," said Brig. Gen. Samuel Mahaney, ARPC commander, during a meeting with members of the Senior Executive Service who visited ARPC Aug. 5.

Daniel Sitterly, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, and John Fedrigo, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force Reserve Affairs and Airman Readiness, received feedback from ARPC members and leaders which could potentially help improve policy or change legislation.

"Our mission is for us to continue to improve our human capital programs and policies so that we can execute our mission today and for the future force," Sitterly said. "What I intend to get out of [these meetings] is the fourth tenet of your commander's leadership style and that is feedback. What we want from you is to hear all the wonderful things that you are doing for sure, but we want to hear what you think are some good ideas for the future as we go forward."

Progress and feedback is what they got.

"Our guys worked with the system program office to replace those old parts [on vPC-GR] and as a result, we've had three months in a row where that has not happened," Mahaney said. "Because of the infrastructure, not the software, we went from basically unsatisfactory to barely satisfactory, so we're at least at a level now where we are able to look at wing commanders in the eye and say we're making some progress," the general said.

ARPC relies heavily on a complex relationship of outside organizations that own the infrastructure. The majority of problems causing systems degradation of virtualized personnel services do not occur within ARPC or its control.

Regardless, ARPC members are committed to providing generations of Airmen with world-class customer service.

"We could say we don't own the infrastructure and stop right there, but it's our responsibility to take care of our customers," Mahaney said. "We have to go ahead and come up with solutions ourselves."

ARPC has not only generated solutions, but has begun an implementation plan that wastes no time in improving service for customers.

"We are doing a phased approach to come up with mid-term solutions. And we're expecting to have something in place by January of next year," Mahaney said. "At that point, we will have gotten far above the satisfactory line in pursuit of excellence."

The first phase will virtualize ARPC's server at Buckley AFB. The next step will be to put that server on a cloud and connect to a mid-tier server at Robins AFB, Georgia, which will also be virtualized. The final phase will determine a hosting solution.

In the meantime, ARPC members have implemented a number of short-term solutions that have increased vPC-GR's reliability and speed.

The team started by expanding the bandwidth from 20 megabytes to 45 megabytes resulting in faster service and fewer spinning "doughnuts of death," the familiar spinning icon that indicates a program is locked up and not responding. Next, they focused on increasing the thread count (the number of processes computers can fit through the network), which was set at 200.

"The 201st customer would get a message saying service unavailable. So we increased that to 750 [thread count] and we are working towards increasing that even more," said Mahaney.

Other briefings presented to Sitterly and Fedrigo included process integration with the Air Force Personnel Center at Randolph AFB, Texas, and an update on Human Capital Transformation which is almost 100 percent complete.

To learn more about these initiatives, as well as all of ARPC's goals and objectives, click here for ARPC's Strategic Plan, 2014 - 2018.