The Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) is a National Weather Service modernization program, contracted to PRC Inc. In true partnership spirit, the Government and PRC have completed a robust development process that has lead to four major software releases. An accelerated deployment of AWIPS throughout the conterminous 48 States, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam is now underway. A vital part of this deployment is the AWIPS Network Control Facility (NCF). The NCF is responsible for ensuring the entire system operates within the availability and reliability specifications, and for maintaining a 7 day, 24 hour Help Desk that will promptly respond to all operational problems. The NCF also supports new software installations and upgrades. To support a fully deployed AWIPS, the NCF requires extensive automation of monitor and control processes, a Web-based automated trouble ticket system to which operational users can gain access, a knowledge base to facilitate rapid and accurate trouble shooting, and additional tools to improve NCF operator efficiency.
The Network Control Facility Build Out (NCFBO) will provide several new or enhanced COTS products to provide these necessary improvements. These products will include Hewlett-Packard's Enterprise Management product (IT/Operations), a state of the art Help Desk product, a Hewlett-Packard event correlation capability (Event Correlation System), a middle management capability to support distributed monitoring and event correlation (Seagate NerveCenter), automated fault detection and management (IT/Operations and NerveCenter), and a custom built site software inventory capability.
The purpose of this paper is to briefly discuss how these new NCF capabilities
will be implemented and employed by the NCF to improve the timeliness
and accuracy of technical responses to operational site problems. This
improved response will permit the NCF staffing to remain fairly constant
as new sites are deployed while simultaneously increasing the AWIPS
system availability and reliability