Rugged Servers for Military Drones: Powering a Missile Tracking System

The contractor expressed concerns over certain hardware reliability and security issues encountered with other vendors. As a customer providing a mission-critical rugged computing solution to the military, the contractor valued that Trenton could better ensure the quality, reliability, and security of its rugged computing solutions by designing, manufacturing, assembling, integrating, testing, and supporting its products and components in the USA.

In addition, the contractor needed to secure a quality, RAID-10-capable hardware RAID controller with a low likelihood of failure. They expressed dissatisfaction with the performance of previous RAID controllers, adding that their faultiness had resulted in single points of failure in the field. A quality RAID controller would also help the customer achieve the desired level of fault tolerance and speed for the drives in their system's RAID array.

The contractor also needed to ensure that the servers could fit inside their custom enclosures, as well as ensure that the servers were equipped with frame grabbers, for capturing still images from the tracking system’s high-resolution video stream; discrete, high-performance GPUs, for efficient rendering; and two 10GbE fiber-optic ports, for quality, high-speed data transmission.

• Provide the contractor with secure rugged servers capable of fitting inside their custom enclosures aboard the drone
• Ensure that the contractor receives quality hardware RAID controllers capable of supporting a RAID 10 array
• Acquire suitable I/O cards for frame grabbers, GPUs, and 10GbE fiber-optic ports
• Equip the contractor’s systems with adequate storage, memory, slots, and CPUs to support the high-speed data storage and processing needs of their highly demanding, video-intensive application

The greatest challenges posed to Trenton were ensuring that the customer’s high-resolution video and imagery requirements were met, that the proposed systems would be able to fit inside the customer’s custom enclosures aboard the UAV, and that the systems themselves could effectively and efficiently provide key computational insights from a continuous stream of high-resolution video data for many years to come.

Trenton Systems provided the contractor with TRS3501 rack mount servers. These specific servers are true data processing powerhouses, equipped with dual Intel Xeon Silver CPUs, 64GB of DDR4 memory, dozens of terabytes of high-speed NVMe storage, NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, RAID-10-capable hardware RAID controllers, high-performance frame grabbers, and fiber-optic-capable, quad-port, 10GbE SFP+ network adapters.

Not only did these lightweight 3U rugged servers fit perfectly into the contractor’s enclosures, but they allowed for front-access to the NVMe SSDs for any necessary hot-swapping from the RAID 10 array, which further provided the customer with a balanced mix of fault tolerance and read-write speeds using RAID 10’s mirroring and striping technologies.

After taking advantage of Trenton Systems’ industry-leading loaner program, the contractor had secured durable, secure, long-life, high-performance, made-in-USA rugged computing solutions that would, for years to come, provide key insights based on the video and imagery data collected by the UAV missile tracking system’s sensor hardware.

For more information about the TRS3501 and how it can support your program or application, check out the TRS3501 datasheet or contact us today.

*Due to strict non-disclosure agreements in place, we are prohibited from mentioning company and/or project names.