Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions Division is working with Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) to bring Kubernetes to the tactical edge.
Curtiss-Wright’s PacStar 400-Series tactical communications solutions, such as the PacStar 451 Server Module and PacStar MDC, will be able to host the Rancher Multi Cluster Manager (MCM) and Harvester hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) technologies, to support both container and virtual machine workloads at the edge.
The strategic partnership will also extend the public, private, hybrid, and government cloud, from all leading cloud service providers, to disrupted, disconnected, intermittent and low-bandwidth (DDIL) environments while maintaining stringent U.S. Government Security Regulations.
The companies assert that this will provide warfighters at the edge with access to the enterprise-class cloud capabilities they have come to rely on, regardless of connectivity, and will enable users to better manage critical workloads and more easily deploy applications from the cloud to the edge.
Rancher offers compatibility with vast numbers of containers. Both Rancher MCM and Rancher’s Kubernetes distribution, RKE2, have a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) written Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG), and the PacStar hardware solutions are included in the STIG-ready profile. Rancher supports leading cloud services including Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE.
Brian Perry, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions Division, commented; “Our warfighters have come to rely on cloud computing capabilities, but until now, connectivity issues have hindered their availability at the tactical edge.
“We are very excited to partner with Rancher Government Solutions to bring their secure enterprise-class cloud capabilities hosted on the PacStar® 400-Series platform to the tactical edge for the first time. We look forward to extending our relationship with Rancher Government Solutions to develop edge solutions for our customer base.
“Our plans include bringing their technology to additional Curtiss-Wright compute platforms, including the newly released size, weight, and power optimized PacStar 200-Series, the ultra-rugged Parvus® DuraCOR® product family and our broad range of 3U and 6U VPX form factor SOSA aligned solutions.”
Ben Zifrony, RVP of Channels and Alliances at Rancher Government Solutions, added; “We are proud to be working with Curtiss-Wright to deliver transformational solutions focused on the U.S. Government military and civilian use cases and tailored to the unique demands of the Tactical Edge.
“Our combined solutions are not just about adapting to the edge but thriving in it, delivering a cloud-native platform that is secure, scalable, and sustainable, across Curtiss-Wright’s compute platforms and regardless of the operating environment.”
