Over the last couple of months I had been involved in the development of the ‘DCIS-Cube’, the new architecture that will be used as a ‘portable’ and easy deploy-able system by NATO’s Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency).
Portability and the ease of deployment of infrastructure in regions of deployment have always been challenging for the NCI. When they have to deploy a small datacenter to support a mission somewhere on the globe, they have to ship a couple of racks with hardware to that specific place. Apart from the logistical nightmare of moving a ton of hardware, they are struggling with the actual deployment of all that hardware as well. As every single mission has different requirements they can’t prepare the solution somewhere centrally, and then ship it to the action zone.
Normally, the NCI Agency would contact different partners and ask them how they would deploy this. However this time the NCI decided to involve different vendors. Those vendors got the following question.
“We want to evolve from logistical and deployment problems to an infrastructure that is:
- Easy to setup
- Fast Time To Deployment
- Based on Industry Standards
- Easy to Evolve
- Software Defined by Design
- Security by Design with Network Function Virtualization
- Automated out of the box “
I was involved to help and solve parts of the total picture. All the different vendors had their input into the design that should tackle most and hopefully all the different requirements. At VMware we could provide a solution that fits most of the requirements. We used the VMware Validated Design which includes compute, storage, network virtualization. I demonstrated the operational model when using VSAN. Starting from deployment to the actual day to day management is very different compared to today. Also the interchangeability of hardware underneath the total platform is of course a very interesting path to follow. We also demonstrated the way the package could be deployed automatically. In a few hours the solution was ready to get prepared with the different applications to deploy a specific mission.
The evolutionary design has now been published in a whitepaper by NCI Agency. Feel free to read it in more detail.
You can find the whitepaper here!
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