NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Like every other entity that relies upon technology to do its job, the Navy has to constantly contend with systems that fail or become outdated. When such systems are situated on ships that could be situated anywhere in the world, the challenge potentially becomes even more acute.
Andover, Massachusetts-based Mercury Systems thinks they have the answer to the conundrum. Building on the company’s years of experience working with numerous Navy programs, most notably the Aegis Combat System, they believe that a modular approach offers the best method of ensuring seamless functionality. With that, Mercury Systems introduced its second-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors at Sea-Air-Space 2019.
“Commercial products go obsolete, and technology changes too fast,” said Rick Studley, chief of technologies for Mercury Systems Trusted Missions Solutions in Chantilly, Virginia, during a Monday interview.
Mercury Systems provides hardware on nearly every surface combatant big-deck ship and submarine in the Navy. With its modular approach, the company’s products allow for switching out old or broken components for new ones in complex systems without changing shock isolation, power or cooling already in place.
“We can abstract applications from underlining hardware, making the technology insertion much easier,” Studley said.
Moreover, with the presence of multiple virtual machines, systems can run on smaller sets of hardware — saving valuable shipboard space. This is done by running “virtual twin” systems in parallel with existing ones, for example, on a system like Aegis. The “twin” systems can take passive taps from the actual system — data from sensors, with the weapon system’s actual code. In simplistic terms, the “twin” can integrate with the actual server. Over time, tactical servers, which are bare-metal and redundant, would evolve into fully virtualized systems, Studley said.
“The goal is to move away from redundancy and toward resiliency, so that no single element in the system is so important that you can’t afford to lose it [and still function],” he said.
[and still function]
“It’s totally modularized and virtualized. You accept that failures are going to happen, but your machine keeps working,” Studley said. “The system heals itself around these failures.”
The process allows for greater sharing of technology across platforms, applications and systems, Studley said. The Navy would save money by having an infrastructure that is easily upgraded, managed and deployed, he added.
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