SPECIAL FEATURE
Unleashing Data to Advance Our Defense Strategy By Jim Ison, Vice President, One Stop Systems, Inc. The Challenge of Data Volume When most of us think about moving data, we don’t think of an amount of data that requires a semi-truck to move it. But as applications at the edge are generating copious amounts of data, the calculus for this bottleneck has led One Stop Systems to build a family of storage solutions to address these needs with an eye for forward, harsh environments. The DoD data Strategy to become a data-centric enterprise requires that all DoD leaders treat data as a weapon system and manage, secure, and use data in the most effective ways possible. Being a data-centric organization, the vision is to use data at speed and scale that improves operational advantage and increased efficiency. Focusing on data for an advantage on the battlefield, to improve oversight, or to drive informed decisions up and down the command chain, are of paramount concern. This is essential to pivot on data more rapidly than our adversaries.
Gbps connection enabling the transfer of 200 terabytes each day you might expect to have a connection fee that exceeds $40,000 a month. Although this might be reasonable in some environments; the practicality is limited. The capture and moving of data are simple enough when calculating the volumes, speeds, and costs of the link. And in those instances where cost is the regulating issue, statistics such as the one Amazon reported on indicating that a data warehouse containing 40TB can exceed $880,000 annually can easily be delineated to the time value of money. In penciling out the cost of a dedicated data link and the time value of the data, being able to transfer data physically can
shave significant costs and be done faster. In an optimized network, the pipe between the sender and the receiver is maximized by keeping the inflight data at maximum data rates including all the overhead, but when days turn into weeks, the physical transfer stands out as the solution of choice. The Solution In situations where the edge environment is mobile or is in a forward command center, the OSS storage solutions are designed to meet the rigors of a hostile environment – referred to as their Centauri product family. Three configurations can address situations from small, medium, or large storage capacity and
In the commercial world, Amazon addressed these needs by creating the Snow family of products. They come in small, medium, and large, with the Snowmobile being a 45-foot semi-truck able to transport 100 Petabytes of data. Although this type of solution might be satisfactory when transporting between a DNA sequencing lab in New York and a data center in Los Angeles that has an interstate connecting the two, it falls short when dealing with Edge positions in hostile or remote environments. Like all storage concerns, the ability to capture and convey data to an actionable conclusion remains the same. But acknowledging that today’s sensor arrays, machine learning, satellite feeds, radar arrays, optical telescopes, and the multitude of other data sources have led to the need for data capture in ways that the physical transfer of data in a container has its advantages. At the extreme with a very expensive dedicated network supporting a 25 16
COTS Journal | March 2022
Figure 1: AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck.
