It's not just Steve Jobs who's promoting storing your data in the cloud. The mad scientists at Darpa want a secure cloud for the military. Their counterparts at the Office of Naval Research are moving in the same direction.
Just one problem. Unlike Apple, the military's networks are going to have to work in low-bandwidth environments, like the Afghan mountains, under the oceans or even Antarctica. There's more data to share than there is bandwidth to carry it all. That's where a European company called Infonic comes in.
Infonics created a software solution called Geo-Replicator that allows users of military networks to share data while cutting down on bandwidth-draining redundancies. The idea is that low connectivity environments don't have to be isolated nodes in the military net. That way, "the network doesn't become the barrier to sharing information," says Lawrence Poynter, Infonics' chief technology officer.
Poynter spoke from the Naval Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command's San Diego laboratory, where he's showing a test of the software that purports to get data around networks running as slow as 2 kilobytes per second. The Navy's been a customer of Infonic's products for the last eight years. Its software helps the Navy's "Distance Support" network keep technicians out at sea connected to maintenance manuals for complex naval systems. Same thing with the Marine Corps.
An anecdote Poynter shares explains the gist behind Geo-Replicator. Not long ago, a NATO commander in Germany wanted to send his subordinates daily updates to "a beast" of a PowerPoint presentation sized at 50 megabytes. "It froze the network. Everyone was trying to download 50 megabytes of content," he recalls. He ran the same file out through Geo-Replicator, and the software searched for redundant data between the last version of the PowerPoint and the new update, sending out only the new stuff.
All that transmitted was in the low tens of kilobytes. But "once you transmitted the update file, you then regenerated a 50 megabyte PowerPoint file, and everyone could read that local file. All that bandwidth traffic zapped out," Poynter says.
And that's in highly-connected Germany. Ultimately, NATO's Document Handling System will use Geo-Replicator to push information out to Gen. David Petraeus' headquarters in Kabul and then "down to the FOBs," the bases in remote areas of Afghanistan, Poynter says.
Not that troops necessarily need more access to PowerPoint presentations. But if the military's increasingly looking to the cloud to store its data, and push it out to mobile devices like smartphones, Infonic's method of trimming out the fat clogging the bandwidth arteries might be worth studying.
Photo: Flickr/National Archives
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