Rapid adoption of cloud technologies by defense organizations provide opportunities to achieve C5ISR overmatch – as long as networks can reliably deliver those benefits at the tactical edge. Join experts Theresa Thompson, Sr. Systems Engineer, VMware, and Dominic Perez, VP of Systems Engineering at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions in a discussion of small form factor, rugged, modular data center technologies from PacStar, made multi-cloud-ready with VMware Technologies.
Transcript
Bob Ackerman
Good day everyone. I'm Bob Ackerman, the Editor-in-Chief of Signal Magazine. I'd like to welcome you to our Signal media webinar titled Reliable Multi-Cloud access at the Tactical Edge. In today's webinar, which is sponsored by PacStar and VMware, two experts will discuss how new tactical networks must be able to bring the benefits of the cloud, machine learning and the Internet of Things to the warfighter at the edge. Now, those of you who have participated in past Signal webinars are familiar with our audience interface.
Throughout the presentation webinar attendees are encouraged to submit questions electronically through the ask a question box on the webinar console. When our experts are finished with their presentations they'll answer as many questions as time permits during this hour-long session. Also the resources tab offers resources to attendees throughout the event.
Today's first presenter is Dominic Perez, Vice-President of Systems Engineering for PacStar at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions. During his 13 years at PacStar he has supported development of the company's tactical hardware and software focusing on compute virtualization and virtualized network functions.
Joining Dominic as a presenter is Theresa Thompson, Senior Systems Engineer at VMware. Theresa concentrates on the defense and federal markets where she focuses on hyper-convert solutions. Her 25-year career in information technology includes expertise in data protection and storage along with system and data availability. So with that I'd like to turn the presentation over to Dominic Perez. Dominic?
Dominic Perez
Thanks Bob. Let me get PowerPoint working. There we go. So first I'd like to set the stage a little bit and define what we mean by the tactical edge. Edge processing is a hot topic in enterprise these days but typically this means a server closet or a room in a branch office. It's less than a data center but it still has racks, power and cooling that's suitable for standard enterprise equipment. You can see the gentleman there. Probably not your dream data center but still a pretty nice setup. The edge that we intend to discuss is for deployed equipment that needs to be portable whether it's deployed in a tent, mounted in a vehicle or schlepped on someone's back. At the tactical edge pounds matter, watts matter and every bit of bandwidth matters. So you can see a typical tactical edge knock in the picture on the right and actually this is a pretty good setup because they've got the big screens out and the large tent but that gives you a little bit better idea of the environment that we're talking about.
So looking at the motivations for this we see the army's CFT priorities for capability set for 2023 is data replication between remote computing nodes over low bandwidth comms. These DILL or disconnected intermittent and limited comms environments produce a tremendous challenge for commercial solutions. These commercial solutions are cast and forged in the enterprise data center with nearly infinite power, infinite space, nearly infinite cooling and tons of bandwidth. Those solutions tend to fall flat or fail to deliver when you take all of that power and resources away. Cloud architectures for tactical users need to be able to cope under these less than ideal circumstances and still deliver critical services. If we take a step back and look at the CFT priorities across the current and next iterations we can see that cloud is not a one-off. The army expects to be deploying cloud capabilities with CS23 but the requirements for those cloud capabilities are going to increase. They've highlighted robust cloud capability for Capability Set 25. Additionally, the command post of the future is going to be mobile. Not only will the edge compute need to be small and power efficient, it will need to be rugged enough to survive the rigors of ground, air or sea operation and the transport associated with those.
In a recent interview with C4ISRNET, Lieutenant General Timothy Haugh highlighted that the Air Force originally built out their cyber capabilities in a peacetime environment where they had the luxury of processing the data back home and then pushing the intelligence forward. That's just not going to meet the needs of tomorrow's warfighter. The compute power will need to be enabled at the tactical edge for independent processing and then later synchronized over these challenging DILL communications. We also see the evolution of the troubled JEDI cloud contract into today's push to the joint warfighter cloud capability or JWCC.
When JEDI was originally put out there about three years ago it seemed like there was going to be one cloud to rule them all but in those three years it's become evident that no one cloud fits all the use cases for the DoD and they're going to need to leverage multiple cloud environments to achieve and maintain overmatch. Communications and compute systems deployed to the tactical edge will also have to leverage and support these multiple cloud environments, something that's lacking from a lot of COT solutions. One company that's paving the way for our "any cloud, anywhere" future is VMware. I'd like to pass the microphone over to Theresa Thompson, Senior Systems Engineer from VMware to give you some experience that she and her team have learned deploying cloud solutions for DoD and other tactical users. Theresa?
Theresa Thompson
Thanks Dominic. Next slide. VMware has been in partnership with the Department of Defense, enterprise and technical edge communities for over 20 years. During this time VMware and the DoD has worked together to solve challenging problems across many DoD missions, from enabling operating platforms and digital infrastructures to providing modern application development frameworks and environments.
Our solutions extend from on-premise to the cloud where we have partnered with global cloud service providers to create a secure and resilient VMware multi-cloud experience. By deploying consistent infrastructure across clouds, customers gain consistent operations and intrinsic security in a hybrid and multi-cloud operating model. The net result is that the intricacies of infrastructure fade, allowing IT to focus more on deploying applications and providing secure access to those applications and data. With a cloud-operating model that operates within the data center at the network edge and within the public cloud, VMware provides the most flexible range of solutions that can be customer-managed, VMware-managed and partner-managed through leading government cloud service providers allowing the members of the DoD to be able to utilize any device to use any application no matter where the application may live, in the DoD data center, at the technical edge or in a government-approved cloud. Next.
How do we do this? For on-prem workloads VMware cloud foundation is a hybrid cloud platform that provides full-stack hyper-converged infrastructure to modernize data centers and deploy modern container-based applications. VMware cloud foundation integrates vSphere, vSAN, NSX and vRealize management in a full-stack, software-defined environment with infrastructure automation, intrinsic security and complete software lifecycle management. By automating the deployment and configuration of all the infrastructure resources, VMware class foundation simplifies the ongoing lifecycle management across the entire environment. Customers looking to deploy and manage their private cloud infrastructure within their data center or at the edge can deploy VMware cloud foundation as a customer-managed full-stack hyper-converged platform that unifies containers, Kubernetes and virtual machines in one environment with software-defined storage and networking all from VMware. We have seen customers utilize VMware class foundation in a number of different use cases which can be categorized in four main areas. Next.
First is at modernization of traditional enterprise applications and new container-based cloud native applications. Deployment of containers and virtual machines on a single unified platform and by utilizing virtual network microsegmentation to secure line of mission applications increasing the application security and compliance to regulatory requirements. The other use case we see a lot is data center consolidation by consolidating architecture from multiple organizations into one environment customers are able to reduce costs, simplify operations by standardizing them on a hyper-converged infrastructure and increase security posture at the network edge and through out each layer of the infrastructure while introducing a cloud operating model to their local environment preparing them for moving to the hybrid cloud. Third use case we also see is enabling the distributed workforce that helps IT organizations to provide support for distributed workers. It was extremely evident when covid first came out and everybody had to go to the distributed work model. Being able to quickly scale virtual desktop infrastructure and management with automation resource management and visibility with full-stack security for the distributed workforce allowed them to quickly drive computing processing in remote offices and edge locations. And finally the private and hybrid cloud deployments to bring organizations into a cloud operating model with consistent infrastructure across private hybrid and edge cloud environments. This is increasing standardization and automation and agility within data centers and being able to utilize those same processes for hybrid and edge environments while continuing to provide full staff automation and life cycle management across the entire environment. Next slide.
Let's take a look at the service attributes when utilizing VCF on-premise or VMware cloud services provided by our cloud service providers. These solutions provide software-defined data center operating infrastructure quickly and easily because it's built on standardized and validated architectures with integrated software-defined cloud platform which automates and simplifies the storage policy management and includes built-in intrinsic security. This will support traditional and new workloads enabling a streamlined path to hybrid cloud. By integrating with Tanzu customers can unify containers, Kubernetes and virtual machines to modernize traditional and cloud-native applications deployed on-premise at the edge and across the entire hybrid cloud. VMware solutions provide complete automations to consistent network and security following best practices and guidelines to ensure protection against internal and external threats and meets DoD-compliant security standards and extends this seamlessly between all environments. Across all the environments VMware's vRealize suite also being recognized as our cloud management platform provides a consistent approach to each private or public cloud through a common known interface. VMware's cloud management platform extends across all major cloud providers and manages them just like DoD's on-premise data centers. Next slide.
The key benefits of VMware cloud foundation or hybrid cloud platforms really allows members of the DoD to accelerate the time to mission by eliminating complex provisioning and management processes. This then reduces the risk for an environment deployment by enabling quick repeatable and secure deployment based upon a standardized VMware-validated design allowing military members to be confident in knowing how an environment is built and should operate no matter where that environment might be located. Overall, by eliminating complex processes and standardizing environment deployments this will reduce the total cost of honors ownership to operate all of these dispersed environments. the most important benefit for the DoD in my mind however is enabling and preparing for the future, being able to handle not only the current workloads that are critical but also any future workloads whether they be traditional or cloud-native containerized applications in the same environment, allowing those environments easily to morph over time from running 80% traditional applications today to 80% cloud native containerized applications in the future. Next slide.
VMware solutions allows the Department of Defense to be agile while reducing the retraining needed to manage the various environments whether that environment is a regional operations center, a modular data center or a forward kit. By leveraging VMware's cloud services on each cloud service partner the DoD is able to maximize the return on investment of their extensive workforce training with VMware's virtualization and management tools today and today VMware software is used extensively by every service and component. Now i'm going to turn this back over to Dominic so we can hear more about PacStar's solutions that combined with VMware can facilitate the DoD in reaching their goals at the tactical edge.
Dominic Perez
Thanks Theresa. I'll talk about PacStar's modular data center. The modular data center is built on the PacStar 400-series, a proven certified modular small form factor communications platform that's already widely deployed throughout the DoD. Through the flexibility of our modular approach we can take the same PacStar 400-series modules used for our baseband communications and CSfC solutions and enable powerful forward-deployed cloud-synchronized solutions at the tactical edge. The heart of the modular data center is our PacStar server modules. At the top you see an example of one - the PacStar 451 is our single-slot module measuring five inches by seven inches and just one U high. We have a variety of processor and IO options available but when building out a data center for the tactical edge we tend to focus on our 8, 12 or 16-core Xeon D-powered units. Those are available with up to 120 gigs of RAM each and the newest version of these servers supports dual four-terabyte NVME drives and a separate NVME drive for OS boot files. Perfect for vSAN but we'll get to that in a minute.
We also have our PacStar 455 storage module - this is the unit at the bottom left. It is the same footprint but 3U high to house an LSI broadcom RAID controller and support up to eight two-and-a-half inch SSDs. If you load this all the way up with our largest available drives you can have in excess of 122 Terabytes of storage all in a compact six-pound package. We also have compute modules with powerful NVIDIA GPUs. Shown here is the PacStar 453 with a T1000 gpu. We also have a 454 module with an RTX 5000 GPU. The 453 is a 2U 2-slot module. The 454 is a 3U 3-slot module. Networking is also critical to performance of the data center. We connect our data center servers with the PacStar 448. This unit is powered by the Cisco ESS to create a compact high performance low-latency 10 Gig switch for the tactical edge and it supports all of the standard features that our other 400 series modules support. So we pull all these modules together and we put them into our smart chassis. The smart chassis provide AC power input, DC power input and UPS functionality for the data center that we have built. In this illustration it is housed in one of our carbon fiber carry-on cases that is airline carry-on-sized.
We also have vehicle mount frames as well as rack mount frames for standard 19-inch racks. This particular configuration is called the MDC-NR. It was released at AUSA just this month and we have pushed the industry forward to support those three NVME drives in each one of our 451 server modules along with enabling IPMI for enterprise grade remote management capabilities. So this configuration provides an aggregate of 120 CPUs, a full Terabyte of RAM and 64 Terabytes of storage. Because the PacStar 400 series is modular we can mix and match servers and other functions to create your system that meets your mission needs. Here we see that we've combined the PacStar 451 servers with the storage-heavy 455 and a 454 GPU-enabled server. When we look at this payload we see that we have 64 CPU cores but we bring in 3072 CUDA cores or if you're using different style of GPU acceleration there's also 48 RT cores or 384 tensor cores on that along with all that there's half a Terabyte of RAM and 846 Terabytes of storage. But that's really just the beginning, you can mix and match and come up with nearly any configuration. So the hardware is great but the VMware cloud foundation software that Theresa introduced is what really makes this powerful. It's no longer just a case full of servers but a real solution that provides enterprise grade features our warfighters deserve - redundancy, resiliency, ease of deployment, and cloud integration.
So PacStar has been deploying VMware-powered solutions for more than a decade and currently we have seven different server families listed on the VMware compatibility guide with more on the way. In fact by the end of the year all of our server products will be listed and this is something that we've committed to for future products as well so every new server that we produce will in short order bey on the VMware compatibility guide. We've also worked with VMware to list a couple of turnkey solutions on their marketplace or solutions exchange. There is a two-node direct connect cluster for deploying a lot of redundant storage in a very small package and we also have the turnkey solution of the PacStar MDC-NR that I introduced a few slides back. So I'm going to talk about how PacStar deploys VMware-powered solutions first from a bottom-up perspective and then as a as a whole. So starting at the bottom layer is the vSphere hypervisor or ESXI that we all know and love, we inherit all the great ESXI features that you know and all of the skills that you've learned with ESXI and the stigs that have been written and the other security procedures that you know how to do all carry over into the VMware ecosystem. then we add in VMware vSAN.
Without a doubt vSAN is the most powerful component and popular component of VMware cloud foundation. It's a simple and powerful way to share storage and pull CPU resources for VM workloads. This aggregated storage is fast and resilient and even on its own can be connected to cloud providers. This is made even more powerful when we look at all of VCF for a true software-defined data center wherever that data center may be deployed. Serving VM workloads as well as containers powered by Tanzu for your cloud native applications. I don't have enough time to go in-depth today but one of the most popular use cases for these powerful edge-deployed solutions is virtual desktop infrastructure. VMware horizon provides a powerful tool set to create and manage pools of virtual desktops. Those desktops can then be accessed from any device but there's greatly simplified deployment, provisioning update management and security management for user desktops. We worked with numerous customers that are testing this in their labs but US Army Africa is really leading the way in the space with some kits already downrange.
Let's look at some ways that we can deploy vSAN on the PacStar 400 series. We can do a standard vSAN cluster. On the left we have three or more PacStar 451 compute nodes connected to a PacStar 448 10 Gig switch. A configuration like this can be expanded to eight compute nodes like we saw in the MDC-NR all in a single carry-on case or you can use those slots to split up and carry multiple enclaves or you can mix and match with routing and user access functionality as well. As we saw on the solutions exchange we can also do a two-node direct connect cluster with thePacStar 455s for storage-heavy usage - in this case more than 244 Terabytes of raw storage and if you do happen to be deploying to environment where there's a high performance LAN or it's a large LAN we can do a stretch vSAN cluster which offers not just data redundancy but location redundancy as well. Now these can be a bit tricky because there are some very strict requirements that that WAN or large WAN, LAN connection need to meet but there are certainly use cases for it. This is probably one where it's best to call in the PacStar and the VMware engineers to make sure it fits your scenario. So zooming in a little bit on the eight node cluster, you can see that these are all connected up to the 10 Gig switch with either fiber optic cabling or direct connect SFP cables. Because this is a modular solution we can take something like our two-node direct connect cluster and add in a switch and a couple of more compute nodes which can take advantage of the vSAN storage and finally on configurations I want to highlight a two-case solution because there's really no limit to the size of a deployment you can do with the PacStar 400 series. If you exceed more than a nine-module count you can just bring in another case or you can add a baseband or a CSfC case on top of this. Looking at a vSAN solution using rack gear you're looking at a minimum of three servers and a switch and i think that's going to be over 200 pounds before you even put it in a rugged transit case. Then you're talking about exceeding a four-person lift and you get a lot of logistics issues just to get your servers downrange. With the PacStar 400 series you can be a lot more flexible and a lot more mobile.
Once we have vSAN deployed the next thing we must consider is the workloads that we're needing to deploy. The virtual machines are a given but there's a whole new breed of these cloud native applications that are containerized and driven by Kubernetes. If you haven't been paying close attention you may not know that VMware Tanzu allows Kubernetes to be a first-class citizen in the VMware ecosystem. Tanzu really is the simplest path to Kubernetes ready infrastructure while sharing that same hardware that you're already using for traditional virtual machines. You can now allocate resources to Kubernetes namespaces and do self-service management of your container environments. Tanzu doesn't require vSAN but it is the recommended storage solution. One thing to note that while vSAN doesn't technically require vCenter, Tanzu does and you need to allocate resources for that in your planning. Although you're probably already using vCenter if you're using vSAN. So Tanzu with vSAN and a required minimum of four servers and a 10 Gig switch are illustrated here.
Another piece that we can layer into the solution is NSX-T for software-defined networking and security. NSX-T gives full-layer 2-7 visibility and software-defined configuration. Nearly all aspects of the virtual network can be controlled including switching, routing, gateways, firewalls, vpns all without hardware changes. Additionally, NSX-T allows consistent configuration across heterogeneous environments, ensuring your routing and important security profiles are correctly applied. There's no use in delicately defining all of your firewall rules and then having them applied to the wrong interface - there's a ton of very powerful tools built into this solution that make sure that you're getting the right settings applied to the right servers and if a basic profile isn't sufficient there are also APIs for controlling the virtual network for most popular automation tools, things like Ansible, Terraform Python or PowerCLI. So the VMware cloud foundation supports the consolidated architecture with a minimum of four servers. If the space, power and budget are available we also have a recommended seven-server architecture. We can support both 400-series equipment or mix and match with enterprise equipment based on your environment and you can see that illustrated here. While the primary location in this scenario at the top right is based on PacStar equipment, if that happens to be a fixed location that could certainly be enterprise gear and then your edge locations, whether they're tactical or mobile would then be PacStar 400 series gear. The same VMware cloud foundation software can run on both and they can integrate seamlessly. Finally we pull the whole solution into focus using MDC with VMware to give the ability to create hybrid and multi-cloud solutions. VMware on AWS and VMware AWS GovCloud can directly connect to on-premise and edge-based MDC solutions through vCenter using hybrid linked mode and VPN connections. This allows you to seamlessly access on-premise edge and cloud-based workloads just like you do today. So that's with the same vCenter that you're probably already using and all of the skills that you've already developed. For Azure, Google, Oracle and other top cloud providers there's also hybrid and multi-cloud VMware solutions and connectivity solutions. So with that we've wrapped up the prepared presentation portion of the webinar. I'd like to give a shout out to Donovan Stewart, one of my Principal Systems Engineers and a VMware V expert for helping out with the graphics and doing fact checking on the presentation today. With that I'll pass it back to Bob for any questions.
Bob Ackerman
Okay, thank you Dominic. Again, everyone your portal to enter this discussion is the ask a question box. Place your questions there. We'll try to get to as many as we can. Got a couple already lined up and unless someone has directed a question at one particular individual I'm just going to toss up jump balls and let the two of you decide who is the right one to answer it. First, this question. Can we reutilize VMware licenses that we currently own to bring our environment to VMware cloud foundation.
Theresa Thompson
Absolutely, so there are upgrade bundle paths that allows you to take any licenses that you currently own and then license the additional features and functionalities of VCF that you don't currently own to get your entire environment up to VCF. VCF is a greenfield deployment so it will be a brand new installation when we do deploy VCF.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. Another VMware question. Do I need VCF or VMware cloud foundation to connect to VMware on AWS?
Theresa Thompson
No, actually customers can connect to and utilize VMC on AWS without VCF and it's very easy for them to go ahead and move their workloads from the on-prem environments as long as they're running VMware ESX 5.5 and later you can utilize VMware's SRM, VMware's replication or they can also use HCX which is our hybrid cloud exchanger and then there's also tools that are built into VCR7 that allows customers to do a cold migrate of workloads.
Bob Ackerman
Okay, here's a question I think is in Dominic's arena. Are the modules hot-swappable? Are the modules hot-swappable?
Dominic Perez
That's a good question. If you're talking about the module like PacStar 451, they're hot-swappable but swapping would remove power so that one is obviously going to stop functioning and the one that you insert would then begin functioning so yes there is no limitation to that once you consider the implications of removing power from the module. Now we've got another VMware question. What other cloud providers does VMware support? VMware has partnerships with the majority of the cloud service providers. Typical ones that we're seeing with for government solutions are Azure VMware Solutions, Oracle Cloud VMware Solutions, Google Cloud VMware Engine, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions and also milCloud 2 that's provided by DISA.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. All right Dominick, I think this one is yours. You mentioned that the 10 Gig switch is high-performance and low-latency. Isn't 10 Gig the performance?
Dominic Perez
Well that's a good question and a good point Bob. Not all 10 Gig is the same. Not all switches are the same. We have long partnered with Cisco because we know that they are blue chip foundations for switching and routing hardware. With the PacStar 448 10 Gig switch we see very very low latency, sub-microsecond like latency. We have seen some switches on the market whether they are soho switches or switches marketed by others where the switching is not done in ASIC and you are seeing millisecond style latency for packets across that and that can have a dramatic performance decrease to your vSAN storage so you really want as fast a switch as possible and the best switching software when deploying a data center at the tactical edge.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. You talk about minimizing SWaP and low power. How much power are we talking about?
Dominic Perez
So the PacStar case that I showed holds two of our 250 watt chassis so kind of by definition you're limited to about 500 watts. Typically we try to get a solution into the 400 to 500 watt range to balance performance with power usage. Keeping the wattage that low is actually really important. For example, the built-in UPS that we have has about 600 watt hours of capacity so what that means is that if your primary power is lost and you're running on UPS you get in excess of an hour on backup power. Now in a data center you're probably used to looking at, okay i've got 7 minutes or 12 minutes and I have plenty of time to shut everything down or just carry me until a generator kicks over but in the field maybe you're having a much more severe power problem, maybe the generator is out of fuel. And fuel is a great additional thing to consider about power because every bit of power that you put out there, even if you have the generator or the other infrastructure to support it, it's probably going to require more fuel load to support over the long term, so right sizing the solutions for the edge is the best solution.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. Next question. What's the difference between VCF and vSAN plus Tenzu?
Theresa Thompson
So VCF is the suite of solutions that provides virtualization of compute memory storage and networking with the management over wrapper that includes the lifecycle management of the entire suite and then when you're talking about VCN and Tenzu I'm also assuming that you're also including vSphere in there. So that'll allow us to do the virtualization of compute memory and storage with the ability to do Kubernetes containers in that environment. Now that's then missing the software-defined networking component which allows us to do some unique security and stretching of networks between environments. Now remember you can also go ahead and add Tenzu on top of VCF and get the best of all solutions.
Dominic Perez
Okay. So Theresa you'd say it's fair to say you can mix and match the individual pieces as needed but VCF is really bringing all of the functionality into one bundle. Is that right?
Theresa Thompson
Correct, correct.
Bob Ackerman
Let me ask a question about our favorite new security approach, Zero Trust. With everything going out to the edge Zero Trust will have to be out at the edge. But one of the issues is how different networks of different organizations can share data under Zero Trust. Do you think that might be an issue with your approach and how would you address it?
Dominic Perez
Theresa, you want to you want to tackle that? The VMware ecosystem has some very powerful tools with carbon black to help facilitate zero trust. PacStar also has partners with cross domain solutions if those networks that you are trying to interconnect do not happen to be on the same security domain. Do you have more you'd like to add Theresa?
Theresa Thompson
Yeah, currently today VMware is actually working with NIST and with the NSA in order to ensure that our solutions will help enable the Zero Trust and meet the security guidelines that is being set forth by both of those organizations. But that's a very good point and we're working very hard to ensure that our solutions will help lead the way when it comes to Zero Trust across all environments.
Bob Ackerman
The issue with that is another thing that we'll want to touch upon maybe, data sharing. How does your configuration enable data sharing among different organizations and by that I mean even at the cabinet department level.
Dominic Perez
So I think the question is alluding to things like Jazz C2 and the DoD's initiative to have multi-domain information from the sensor to the shooter shared across the various branches It's a very worthy goal, a very lofty goal and it's something that we are trying to help enable by getting the data from the edge to the cloud then we can co-mingle the multi-branches at the cloud and then redistribute both back down and upward for as close to real-time decision making as possible. So getting, well it's not really even a data lake when it's at the tactical edge, it's more like a data pond but that needs to then flow, I'm going to break this analogy terribly, upstream to the data center where it can join the lake and be processed. But making that tactical edge to data center is one of the key legs of the sensor to shooter story.
Bob Ackerman
Right. Okay. Next question is hardware-oriented. Sort of. The PacStar server only has two drives. How does that work with vSAN?
Dominic Perez
So we've got someone that knows the solution well and knows that vSAN requires really three drives. There's a drive for OS boot, there's a drive for cache and a drive for storage and i'm sure Theresa would correct me on the true terminology for those drives but that's the gist of their application and recently VMware has deprecated the USB boot functionality in vSphere and in order to meet that challenge PacStar's newest 451 server, the 451NR, it does have two removable NVME drives and PacStar cartridges so that they are handleable by the soldier and then it has a built-in high performance NVME drive that meets all the requirements for the OS boot for VMware so we can run vSAN right on this and it is a great solution.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. With power in mind, what type of input does the chassis take? Is it just standard AC/DC or can the chassis run on vehicle power?
Dominic Perez
So the chassis will take in AC worldwide it's, sorry I don't have the specs in front of me but it's sub-100 volts to more than 270 volts. It will also take in DC from 10 to 36 volts so typically what you're going to see on a ground vehicle like a Humvee or an MRAP or a razor is a 24-volt bus and then typically what you would see on an aircraft is a 28-volt bus so we're able to take in those vehicle powers directly. There's a mil triple nine connector that is on the back of the chassis and we provide a flying lead harness and we can also work with you to provide a vehicle custom harness.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. Someone else noticed your hardware the PacStar 451NR - how is that different from the PacStar 451?
Dominic Perez
Sure. So the NR designation is what we've decided to use for NVME and remote management to highlight two new features. So the NVME drives that I just talked about, we have the two removable cartridges and the boot drive and then we have IPMI-based remote management. The CPU is the same Xeon D CPU that we have in our standard 451 line, it's got the same 128 Gigs of ram. It's really just the storage and the management options that have changed.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. Here's another one that seems very hardware-oriented. Servers tend to run on the hotter side. Is there any heat issue with the MDC when running high-processing applications?
Dominic Perez
Well heat is always a concern, that's true. One of PacStar's unique features is that when we rate a server for a certain operating temperature it is rated to run at full load at that temperature. So if I say a server is rated 450c or 55c you can run 100 % CPU without throttling indefinitely at that temperature. All of our products are available at least 50c and there are certain configurations that are available up to 60c and so that's all the components have been rated for that so it will definitely feel warm blowing that air out in front of you especially if the ambient temperature is already warm but in terms of safe operation we've got you covered.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. You mentioned CDS solutions. Is this hardware or software-based? Is it virtualized?
Dominic Perez
Well that sounds like a topic for a whole other webinar but we have partners in both domains and it really depends on the type of data that you're transmitting and your CDS approval agency for the branch that you're under, what they are going to require for that. So I do have solutions, a couple of software solutions as well as a hardware diode that we can front end those with but maybe that'll be a Q1 webinar.
Bob Ackerman
Okay We'll consider that I guess. As we wind down here let me ask each of you how much flexibility do you have to upgrade this system as network exigencies change and requirements also grow into the new world?
Theresa Thompson
On the VMware side of the house the upgrades come out as bundles and so what we do is we actually test those bundles all the way through hardware and software compatibility so you no longer have to manage the compatibility matrixes of all the different products and so as those bundles come out you're free to upgrade we have both the capability to do it as a online bundle upgrade or an offline bundle upgrade - take into account those those customers and agencies that might not be connected to the network to download the bundles directly from VMware.
Dominic Perez
And I'll add what Theresa said - the bundles are a hugely beneficial feature and one of the strongest reasons for going with the entire VCF solution because you don't have to micromanage the compatibilities between your vCenter versions and your vSAN versions so she kind of downplayed that but it is really a huge concept and a real time saver for integrators like PacStar In terms of the hardware with the 400-Series modular solution you have the chassis and as we mentioned those are hot-swappable. I don't think you're gonna do a hardware upgrade as a hot-swap but we will continuously bring out faster and better servers with new features like we just did with NVME. If you currently have a PacStar chassis that will slot right in and you can do an upgrade seamlessly.
Bob Ackerman
Okay. Well, with no further questions that concludes our Signal media webinar for today. I want to thank our experts for the presentation and thanks to all of you for joining us. You can link to the archived version of this webinar along with previous Signal webinars on the Signal magazine website at www.afcea.org/signal/webinar. This has been a Signal media webinar sponsored by PacStar and VMware. Thank you again and have a good day.