AWS Outposts containerized for the battlefield
Re-inventing Sun's trailer trash data center
AWS is packaging its Outposts gear in containers for the US military to use in battlefield situations, reinventing Sun Microsystems’ “white trash” containerized datacenters from 2006.
The AWS Modular Data Center (AWS MDC) consists of self-contained compute, storage and internal networking capabilities composed of either AWS Outposts or Snowball Edge devices and installed in ruggedized containers. The intent is that US military customers can access, process and share data at the tactical edge of a battlefield in Denied, Disconnected, Intermittent Low Bandwidth (DDIL) environments.
Liz Martin, defense business director at AWS, said: “As the digital battlefield continues to evolve, our defense customers increasingly need access to cloud capabilities at the tactical edge, including DDIL environments all over the world.
AWS Modular Data Center
“With AWS Modular Data Center, we are converting data centers from fixed infrastructure that is difficult to build and manage in remote environments, to a comprehensive service that is simple to use, secure, cost-effective, and can respond to large-scale compute and storage needs wherever the mission demands.”
Outposts is a fully managed service based on a converged infrastructure rack, including server, storage, networking, and cloud software services. Outposts supports EBS and S3 storage tiers, with a max of up to 380TB per deployed rack.
AWS Outposts rack.
Snowball Edge is an data collection and processing device in a box, using EC2 compute instances. An Edge device provides up to 80 TB of HDD capacity for block volumes and Amazon S3-compatible object storage, and 1TB of SATA SSD for block volumes.
MDCs can be scaled out, like additional datacenter nodes, and come with built-in high-availability. Customers can only run workloads using a scoped subset of AWS services in a DDIL environment, not the whole caboodle. Customers have the option of using satellite communications for network connectivity.
The containers are built for intermodal (ship, rail, truck, air) transport, including military cargo aircraft. Once deployed and hooked up to power, military operators can use AWS services and APIs to run applications in the MDC.
The MDC is available to US government customers who are eligible for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract. The service is currently supported in the GovCloud (US-West) Region and GovCloud (US-East) Region.
Comment
It wpuld not be surprsing if Dell, with its VxRail hyperconverged systems, and HPE, with its Nimble (now Alletra 6000) HCI systems, both had similar boxed edge systems for military customers. But apparently not. Dell has recently announced ruggedized VxRail systems for edge sites. It has an OEM Solutions unit with the Military as one of its market areas, but the brochure doesn’t indicate housing its VxRail and other component systems in a container is one of its offerings.
HPE has its ruggedized Edgeline EL8000 server system for military use but, again, there is no mention of containerized data centers in its documentation that we have seen. Opportunity knocks here for Dell and HPE.