Page 44 - GCN, Jun/July 2016

EN TE RP RISE
SPONSORED REPORT
OUTL K
Hyper Convergence
Beyond the Back Office Computing
Rugged mobile platforms designed to operate in hazardous field environments deliver the same capabilities as office-based systems.
Military and emergency management personnel spend their working
hours in the field and on the move. But just because they don’t sit at
a desk doesn’t mean they don’t require the same level of access to critical applications and the robust infrastructure they would get in an office building.
In fact, the demand for access to critical data, applications, and col- laboration tools is even more critical in an emergency situation. First responders and forward-deployed teams need to have the functionality of a home office without having to be tethered to one location.
One of the challenges of a field environment is the environment in the
field: heat, water, dust, dirt, rain, sand, and whatever else the local landscape decides to throw in the mix. If a mobile data center platform exists, the foot- print is limited (so that it can be easily transported by truck or helicopter,
for example). The solution is build
a strong back office that supports workers operating in a wide range of environments and locations.
Federal agencies should see their infrastructure as a hub and spoke system. At the heart, a common architecture and high-performance workloads that can be accessed as easily from disparate spokes as it can from headquarters. Matt Trace- well refers to it as “beyond-the-back- office computing.” He adds, “Federal agencies can take workloads they have optimized for the data center and deliver them on an identical
platform, engineered to meet specific computing requirements in the field.”
Tracewell Systems, a pioneer in the emerging field of forward-deployed converged computing, specializes in re-engineer- ing commercial off-the- shelf data center com- puting and enabling it to work in a variety of fixed and mobile locations and in form factors adapted to specialized environments.
Tracewell teamed with Dell OEM to transform its powerful, new FX2 converged computing ar-
chitecture and data center products – featuring compute, networking and storage all in one complete system — into platforms that meet the size, weight and power requirements for environments well outside of the back office.
The resulting product, called
the Tracewell T-FX2, works well on airplanes, aboard ships, and in field lo- cations, both fixed and mobile – while still being fully compatible with Dell’s FX2 data center architecture. This cre- ates a seamless workflow between the back office and field operations.
The T-FX2 is designed specifically to work well in harsh environments or in places where standard Dell FX2 products cannot fit due to space constraints. Tracewell re-engineered the standard Dell FX2 to be lighter, use less power and deliver more cooling capacity than standard Dell FX2 products.
Agencies can also work with Dell and Tracewell to specify additional size, weight, power and other envi- ronmental requirements for these systems – while still maintaining compatibility with off-the-shelf Dell products. Tracewell engineers can even integrate an agency’s critical technology – such as full size, full power PCIe cards – into the Dell- based architecture ensuring the systems will work with whatever existing technology still exists in the environment. This is precisely the type of platform military and emer- gency personnel need to perform in the field.
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