Most people think of laptops or tablets when you mention rugged. As you can imagine, protecting a laptop or tablet with rugged technology could be a challenge to accomplish because they are intended to be mobile devices and well, people are people, and we all don’t have standard desk jobs. Many of us never know from day to day what terrain we may be facing? Field or office?
Unfortunately, rugged laptops and tablets don’t have the processing power needed when it comes to datacenter applications. The mission need has grown for edge, mobile enterprise applications and data collections in the field, so has the need for rugged servers, storage and networking capabilities.
When it comes to supporting the warfighter in theater or other federal field agencies missions, anything less than rugged is not an option. And they do put them to the test.
Let’s start off with one of my favorite that falls into the HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure), Azure Hub.
Bottom line up front, Azure Hub architecture lets you provide Azure services at the edge for remote locations, intermittent connectivity, or event totally disconnected from the internet or outside networks. A rugged version of Azure Hub can be part of a hybrid solution that process data in theater and then aggregated it to another Azure instance either on-premise or in the secure cloud for additional processing and analytics at a later date and time.
What use cases can you think of? How about an Azure Hub in the back of a tactical vehicle with an operator of a drone assessing the terrain. The data is downloaded locally and data analytics can begin to take place. When the vehicle returns, the data is automatically uploaded to the on-premise Azure Stack.
Maybe you just need a standard server for your field applications. Have you seen what the beach does to a standard rack server? A little sunshine, saltwater and sand never hurt a server right? For those applications, why take any chances, go with a rugged server that is built and designed to withstand the elements better than any of us sunscreen on.
Do you need more storage? With the rugged version of the FX-2 you can add additional storage and have a nice compact 4U rugged converged solution. This solution can be configured with 4 servers, with your choice of (2 per compute sled) HDD, SDD or NVMe storage. An expansion storage module enables you to add an additional 8 drives.
It is great to have all these servers and storage, but what about the users? Yes, the thin clients can also be racked and stacked in a rugged enclosure. In only a 5U, this configuration holds 12 Dell Wyse 7040 thin clients.
In today’s cyber threat climate, it is extremely important to choose a vendor that secures their supply chain and know that your solution is TAA (Trade Agreement Act – 19 U.S.C. & 2501-2581) compliant.
Hello everyone. Thanks for stopping by our blog! I joined IMPRES Technology in May of 2018 as a Senior Systems Engineer. Prior to that I had spent over 20 years in the IT industry as a Systems Engineer specializing in enterprise level datacenter solutions for companies like IBM, Arrow and TechData. I’ve embraced the opportunity to work in the federal space supporting our DoD war fighters and civilian agencies. When not busy assisting customers and partners, I enjoy spending time in the outdoors and with my family and friends or volunteering at Habitat for Humanity.
David Coleman