ACADEMIA

New storage architecture serves as the foundation for the industry’s first rugged, 96 terabyte Digital Storage Unit for an advanced ISR system

Mercury Computer Systems has announced breakthrough capabilities for digital storage in embedded mobile applications. Sophisticated new sensors, which generate tremendous amounts of data in commercial and defense applications, have created an unprecedented need to store data on platforms for processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED) or post-mission forensics. Working closely with customers, Mercury’s Services and Systems Integration (SSI) team created an innovative Digital Storage Unit that leverages standard solid-state storage disks (SSDs) and designs customized to meet each application’s specific capacity, size, weight and power (SWaP), redundancy and security requirements.

“The explosion in both the number of sensors and amount of data they generate is driving the need for larger-capacity embedded storage solutions in both commercial and defense applications,” said Didier Thibaud, senior vice president and general manager of Mercury Computer Systems’ Advanced Computing Solutions business unit. “Mercury’s new storage architecture is an adaptable solution that meets this need and accelerates time-to-market for mobile imaging applications by significantly reducing subsystem development time. Using this innovative approach, Mercury helped our customer deploy the industry’s first rugged, 96 terabyte storage system in just 12 weeks.””

The concept of operations (CONOPS) for defense applications such as ground mobile vehicle surveillance and wide-area aerial surveillance require massive amounts of embedded storage that is critical to both on-demand and forensic data analysis. In addition, commercial applications like in-flight entertainment systems that deliver customizable audio and video programming to passengers, scientific research such as geological surveys, earthquakes and plate tectonics studies, and weather studies that provide vital information for understanding and predicting hurricanes, tornadoes and other storms, rely on massive amounts of data collected by advanced sensors.

Until now, systems fell short of meeting the escalating storage demands, both in terms of data capacity and SWaP constraints. Because Mercury’s storage architecture is based on a modular approach that uses standard SSDs, capacity can be sized to exacting requirements within platform constraints. Mercury’s Digital Storage Units are optimized for SWaP, performance, environmental, vibration and temperature requirements and can be tailored to meet a variety of interface demands. In addition, the highly configurable design simplifies customization and provides a stable upgrade path for future needs.

For more information on Mercury’s Digital Storage Units, visit mc.com/storage, or contact Mercury at (866) 627-6951 or info@mc.com.