Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021 - 16

Taking the Tactical Cloud with You
I
Small Form Factor, Modular Data Centers
at the Edge of the Battlefield
n order to achieve and maintain
warfighting overmatch, coordinate
deployed forces and enable new capabilities,
the US Army, Air Force,
and Navy are actively looking to new
programs such as Joint All Domain
Command and Control (JADC2) to ensure
warfighters have maximum situational
awareness. These programs will
deliver a variety of compute and bandwidth
intensive technologies, increasing
the use of big data analytics, artificial
intelligence/machine learning, and
video for example, using common technical
standards, APIs and data formats
to deliver the command and control information
that warfighters need to coordinate
their activities.
The software needed to run these
new capabilities is increasingly being
developed to rely on the cloud, which
itself might reside in a variety of data
centers, ranging from large commercial
services, such as Amazon Web Services
(AWS) GovCloud and Microsoft Azure
Government, to the DoD's Regional
Hub Nodes (RHN), which are located
in five separate strategic regions and
used by deployed Marine Corps and
Army units to access transport information
from
theater tactical networks around the
world.
As forces develop ever greater dependence
on cloud-based services, the impact
of denied wide area access, (known as
Disconnected, Intermittent, and Limited
(DIL) environments) to the cloud, due to
contested communications through
electronic warfare (EW), or diminished
access due to reduced bandwidth must
be addressed. The key to delivering advanced
new tactical capabilities and ensuring
their continued availability when
there's no access to the cloud is to vastly
increase the capability, speed, and mobility
of networking and compute at the
tactical edge of the battlefield. This will
make possible the replication of critical
data and services in mobile, distributed
clouds, moving information resources
closer to the edge of the network.
To keep up with the proliferation of
compute and bandwidth hungry applications
relying on video, sensor
data and AI/ML, to support battlefield
operations, processing
needs to happen locally at
maximum speeds. To enable
the next generation of situational
awareness capabilities, the DoD is looking
to deploy distributed processing and
data replication between remote computing
nodes and the central cloud This
will provide continuity of operations in
the case of network outages or low bandwidth.
Examples
of current cloud replication
programs include the US Army
Cross Functional Team's CPI-2, which
is currently developing prototypes of
its Command Post Support Vehicle
(CPSV). Essentially a mobile data center,
CPSV is a rugged truck that carries a
small data center's worth of servers,
that in future iterations could support a
local cloud.
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Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021

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