Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021 - 18

Military Communications
PacStar
Modular Data
Center with certified VMware
vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure.
Likewise, the Army Future Command
has published a roadmap that specifies
requirements for robust cloud capabilities.
The US Air Force is developing the
Advanced Battle Management System
(ABMS), a federated cloud system that
will provide secure processing from its
CloudONE security cloud already running
in Amazon AWS and Microsoft
Azure government clouds. ABMS also
defines a local cloud, EdgeONE, to provide
continued security in the event
that communications with CloudONE
are disconnected. And the Navy recently
issued an RFP to industry to support
Manned-Unmanned Air Vehicle
Team Tactical Cloud analysis. The RFP
includes an approach for providing remotely
deployed cloud or processing
services in case the tactical unit becomes
temporarily disconnected from
the tactical network.
To realize the capabilities that the mobile
cloud can bring to the tactical edge,
industry will require a new class of
rugged, fieldable, network processing
and data storage solutions that can provide
tactical and expeditionary teams access
to all of the data and compute resources
they need. These systems will
need to be able to provide cloud-like
services, maintaining high operational
availability of applications and data,
even in DIL environments where WAN
connectivity is not assured. What's more,
mobile cloud systems will need to integrate
seamlessly with leading public,
government and private cloud providers.
18
Intro
Cov
Earlier efforts to bring these levels of
performance and service to the battlefield
involved trying to deploy huge sets
of standard datacenter equipment, installed
in shipping containers such as
the Army " Container Express " or
CONEX trials. These systems proved to
be too large and hard to transport, significantly
limiting their mobility.
In addition, these standard solutions
are power hungry, which adds and additional
burden on mobility. At the edge of
the battlefield, fuel is both difficult and
dangerous to transport, not to mention,
very expensive. Higher performance,
small form factor servers, combined with
new approaches to distributed processing,
offer the potential to move smaller
slices of processing even closer to the
edge, improving mobility.
Ruggedness is also a major factor
when it comes to supporting mobile applications.
A mobile data center should
be designed to meet military environmental
standards, such as MIL-STD-810,
to ensure that the system can operate
optimally when exposed to the harsh
temperatures, vibration, shock and EMI
typical of battlefield conditions. Standard
19 " rack mount datacenter equipment
is not designed to withstand
harsh environments and not designed
to operate on the move - leading to
concerns about equipment failure and
loss of availability of mission critical
communications.
To meet the requirements for mobility
and integration into the types of
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platforms on which they might be
mounted, a mobile cloud solution will
need to provide high reliability compute
and storage in a small size, weight,
and power (SWaP) optimized form factor,
that is designed for mission-critical
applications and able to support large
volumes of data. The good news is that
solutions that can deliver the high-density
compute, storage and networking
infrastructure needed to handle such
large loads of data are available today.
These modular systems can be optimized
for program needs, so that the
number of CPU cores, GPU cores or size
of solid-state storage, can be maximized
depending on program needs.
When these modular datacenters are
based on industry standard processors
and Nvidia GPUs, they will be compatible
with a wide variety of applications
and can meet the needs of a vast array
of C5ISR use cases including data gathering,
analytics/AI, and situational
awareness. That means that this new
class of modular datacenter can also
support emerging distributed processing,
storage/replication and hyperconvergence
infrastructure software needed
to deliver mobile cloud services.
An example of a modular datacenter
available today that can support mobile
cloud applications at the tactical edge is
Curtiss-Wright's PacStar Modular Data
Center (MDC), a COTS-based, modular,
tactical and expeditionary, rugged data
center capable of hosting cloud/storage,
AI, and analytics applications. It
uses proven small form factor modules
for compute, storage, and networking
functions with industry leading reduction
in SWaP. This system can be deployed
dismounted, in FOBs, command
posts, ground vehicles, and aircraft, as
well as in upper echelons - for military,
intelligence, law enforcement, and
Homeland Security use. Depending on
the specific use case, PacStar MDC configurations
can include a mix of compute
modules, storage modules, and
GPU modules, along with the company's
switching/routing modules.
With the advancements such as this
in high capacity, rugged, small form-factor
hardware, it's now possible to deploy
emerging software infrastructures to automate
distributed processing and storage,
Aerospace & Defense Technology, October 2021
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Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021

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