Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021 - 19

Military Communications
communications, and cloud replication
required to ensure situational awareness
is maintained to the edge of the battlefield.
Large enterprise software companies
are rapidly developing new technologies
to ensure that data and
applications can move seamlessly from
the cloud to the edge and back, with little
operator intervention. Several key
technologies enabling this include application
virtualization and containerization,
network virtualization, hyperconverged
storage infrastructure.
Application virtualization and containerization
are technologies that decouple
applications from the underlying
hardware, allowing multiple
applications to run securely on a single
server, optimizing SWaP by reducing
the number of servers required to deliver
needed processing. Both technologies
also enable applications to be replicated
or moved from server to server,
and from cloud to edge, balancing the
availability of computing resources or
minimizing latency over network connections.
For tactical organizations, this
offers the potential to move applications
close to the warfighter, reducing
processing delays and providing processing
even when disconnected.
Hyper-converged storage infrastructure
(HCI) technologies decouple the storage
of application data from hardware, while
also eliminating reliance on legacy Network
Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage
Area Network (SAN) architectures. These
new technologies are foundational for
replication of data between cloud and
edge processing - enabling warfighters to
take copies of cloud data into theater, and
replicate changes to data over DIL connections
when appropriate.
HCI also provides local data replication,
for deployed organizations with a
need for high reliability, ensuring that
data is available in-theater even in the
event of a server or disk failure. New advances
in these technologies are rapidly
improving the ability for tactical organizations
to replicate data between any of
the major cloud providers, and moving
applications between the edge and cloud,
providing maximum mobility and maneuver
options for our warfighters.
The benefits of a converged compute/storage/networking
modular datPacStar
400-Series Network Package on Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV)
acenter with modern software infrastructure
at the edge of the network are
numerous. It can support a diverse
array of use cases when operating in
DIL environments, including hosting
situational awareness, mission command
and C2 applications, supporting
SIGINT, HUMINT and IMINT data
gathering and analytics workloads, as
well as emerging IoT and sensor fusion-based
applications. This is ideally
Aerospace & Defense Technology, October 2021 www.aerodefensetech.com
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suited to ensure the new all-domain
situational awareness-driven warfighting
doctrine will succeed while addressing
the DIL reality of communications
at the tactical edge.
This article was written by Charlie
Kawasaki, CTO, and Dominic Perez, VP of
Systems Engineering, Curtiss-Wright Defense
Solutions, PacStar (Portland, OR). For
more information, visit http://info.
hotims.com/79418-503.
19
PacStar
Modular Data Center with
high-capacity storage and Nvidia GPU-enhanced servers.
È
http://info.hotims.com/79418-503 http://www.aerodefensetech.com http://info.hotims.com/79418-967
Aerospace & Defense Technology - October 2021

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