IntellidenHigh Performance Networking - Delivered
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October 06, 2004
Case Study: Network Control in the Battlefield
--Royal Netherlands Army Uses Intelliden R-Series® for TITAAN Military Project--
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Oct. 6, 2004 - The recent military conflicts have ushered in a new defense era for NATO countries, placing greater emphasis on the requirement of coordination and cooperation between nations and the interoperability of their different command and control systems.
Modern war today, as well as modern peacemaking and peacekeeping, requires rapid deployment of army theatres and above all, maximum flexibility. Each country within the NATO military alliance is responsible for contributing a different expertise and set of resources to the alliance.
At the core of this ongoing development is the RNLA's elite Theatre Independent Army and Airforce Network (TITAAN) project team working within the Command Control Support Centre (C2SC), which supports the Network Centric Warfare concept. The C2SC is seen as one of the leading military groups in designing and implementing this concept, and its progress is being watched by the military world.
"Our satellites were coming to the end of their economic life and we wanted to set up a completely integrated system that supported the concept of Network Centric Warfare," said Ed van Beek, Lead Architect, Integrated Management and Control for the RNLA. "This puts the network at the heart of the IT infrastructure and enables layers of functionality, transactions and management to be better controlled through policy-based decision making."
The result is the RNLA's TITAAN project, which uses highly secure, sophisticated IP networks as an active part of military strategy. The C2SC TITAAN development team needed a product with advanced technology to amplify the characteristics of IP networks beyond today's capabilities. After performing initial trials using some of the finest engineers and IT experts on the RNLA research development team, the C2SC selected the Intelliden R-Series® software for the core of its strategic networking-security, agility, reliability and control-that is vital to today's military units.
The TITAAN project has won international acclaim from the prestigious Network Centric Warfare (NCW) Awards, winning the 2004 Best NCW Program / Initiative from a Coalition Partner. The NCW Awards were established to honor, recognize and promote initiatives in the U.S. Department of Defense, Coalition Governments, and defense industry that exemplify the principles of network-centric warfare and support information age transformation.
On the battlefield, the routers and switches that manage voice, data and video IP traffic aren't all anchored in secure data centers. Some have to follow the troops. For instance, dozens of routers might be transported in trucks or tanks in the middle of a large unit of troops.
Network devices stay mobile and as troops move, communications might have to hop from one mode of transmission to another. For example, as traffic moves from line-of-sight microwave to satellite, the difference in available bandwidth can force network administrators to prioritize who is allowed to make calls from which phones. With a network topology so fluid and network conditions so variable, the IT specialists assigned to each unit have a big job on their hands.
Currently, IT specialists have to telnet into the network to make manual changes, prioritizing which phones-identified by their IP addresses-have priority in a restricted bandwidth situations. This manual process can be time consuming, and human configuration errors are always a possibility. In a normal network environment, configuration errors can cause inconvenience. On the battlefield, errors can have disastrous consequences.
The Intelliden R-Series solutions enable networks to operate more intelligently by dynamically responding to strategic goals-be they business or military-and by automating network change management, optimizing network resources, streamlining processes and enforcing policy in network operations. Instead of having to make manual network changes-and risk making errors that could block critical communications-IT personnel can focus on more important issues and operational efficiency is increased.
"We conducted some fairly in-depth field testing in simulated environments and Intelliden was the only company capable of providing us with fully policy-based network enforcement using a model-based approach. This means we can make immediate policy-based decisions to control all of the numerous and disparate aspects of the network-such as satellites, switches, routers-in a unified controlled network architecture," added van Beek.
"By using Intelliden's software we can now consolidate our engineers skill in a central environment, whilst being dynamic in a deployment. This means we can now carry out an efficiency process by cutting back on highly skilled and dedicated engineers in each unit, and yet adapt to changing situations, without time loss.
"Secondly, we expect the network uptime to increase substantially, due to strength of the software to cut out major configuration failures. This would also apply to configuration changes bought on by traffic flows requiring new quality-of-service (QoS) settings," said van Beek.
Using a single, Web-based interface, network administrators are able to manage simultaneous changes to a variety of network routers, switches, firewalls and other devices. Because the Intelliden solution uses business and network policies to control the automation of device changes, military IT specialists in the field won't have to spend time configuring individual devices as conditions change. Instead, network events will trigger automatic changes in network devices, which in turn will support new network services.
"The other aspect of Intelliden is speed of deployment," said Ed van Beek. "It might sound a bit melodramatic, but using Intelliden at the heart of the TITAAN system could make lesser risks because we don't need to send soldiers out in the field to reconfigure devices. The automation of Intelliden means we are not dependent on engineers. Warfare and even peacemaking can involve very extreme conditions, which require a non-static network. We need to jump on the back of a jeep, change locations, yet still maintain maximum robustness and scalability of the system. Unlike war in the twentieth century, which could take ten or twelve weeks to plan and implement, conditions in the twenty-first century could change from peace to war overnight, and our ability to respond quickly and effectively is absolutely fundamental to our success."
In addition to the Intelliden intelligent networking platform, the RNLA is also using the Intelliden Resource Manager, the industry's first application capable of judiciously monitoring and synchronizing all of the hardware resources on an enterprise network. The Intelliden Resource Manager intelligently examines the inherent capabilities of every hardware resource on an IP network for actual physical device configuration, empowering instant provisioning of new business services and immediate implementation of network changes.
The Intelliden Resource Manager provides a dramatic change to the way IP networks are run and managed by eliminating process inefficiencies and further breaking the dependency on manual processes. Unlike simple, low-level network discovery tools, which simply identify what devices exist on a network, the Intelliden Resource Manager provides a business-level view through a single application on each of their capabilities and specific physical configuration.
"Before Intelliden, if we needed to change the network we would have had to physically figure out what needed to be done and then manually make the changes in the field, and by then the situation would have changed yet again. Intelliden abstracts all of the physical hardware and software of every single device in the network and enables us to control and implement these decisions dynamically."
The RNLA is also using Voice over IP (VoIP) as part of the TITAAN project. Soldiers in the field are using a large, modular network connected via low-speed connections, fiber or satellite. Traditionally, making phone calls across this infrastructure can be difficult. The RNLA is using one IP network for both voice and data, and therefore needs to control the flow of traffic going across the network at any one time.
"We need to control the bandwidth for Call Admission Control," added van Beek. "This means a wide-area network in transit in the field has fluctuating bandwidth and might be able to only handle, say, ten voice calls simultaneously, but the eleventh call would significantly degrade all of the other ten. Intelliden and TITAAN monitor and control the amount of fluctuating bandwidth linked to the number of calls and only admit a call if there is enough bandwidth to support it through a dedicated VoIP Bandwidth Broker. In the future, we will also be able to prioritize calls based on our view of policy-based networking, allowing critical or life-threatening messages to get through on a priority basis."
TITAAN is already generating significant interest and requests from numerous other areas of the military. The system will be deployed, based on the requests received by the various organizations, in live military operations.
About Intelliden Corporation
With the Intelliden R-Series® software suite, networks become more intelligent and efficient by dynamically responding to strategic priorities, which allows businesses and organizations to automate network configuration, reduce costs, increase network security and accelerate service activation. The Intelliden R-Series solution consists of four intelligent networking product engines: Auditing, Configuration, Provisioning and Security Management. Intelliden is a global corporation headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo. For more information, visit www.intelliden.com.
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