With a recent award for network management software, the Air Force has indicated it remains on track with efforts to bring a more open-architecture approach to its core ISR collection and analysts system.
The service recently tapped vendor Zenoss to deliver IT monitoring and analytics software for its Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS). As an open-source product, Zenoss could help to further the Air Force goal of making DCGS less dependent on proprietary solutions.
"You've got an IT organization that has existed for a long time with lots of computers, storage and data-center infrastructure, and now the world of the cloud has arrived," Zenoss Senior Vice President Brian Wilson said. Open architecture "is a way of future-proofing all these programs in the face of whatever new technologies may be coming."
The Air Force has been saying it wants to take DCGS' 24/7 operations out of their longstanding stovepipes. In a 2015 news release, the service said the system's closed architecture was taking airmen's time away from their primary analytical duties.
To speed intelligence processing, the Air Force was working on "an open and agile architecture, enabling a plug-and-play-type environment," said Lt. Col. Joshua P. Williams, Air Force DCGS Branch materiel leader.
Service leadership reiterated that direction in a C4ISRNet interview last fall. In the present architecture, each system "was designed for a single and specific purpose, which limits the flexibility to adapt and update the system to meet current operational needs and a changing global threat," Williams said.
Such systems suffer from design isolation, a lack of development agility, long deployment cycles and issues around unsupported hardware and software at the end of the life cycle. By leveraging an open-standards approach, the Air Force "could focus on the integration of already available capabilities to enable a more efficient environment by which to incorporate operational capability," Williams said.
In farming out DCGS systems-monitoring tasks to an open-source software vendor, the service appears to be staying true to this course.
Network integrity
Zenoss software enables real-time monitoring and remediation of networks and computers. In the case of the Air Force's DCGS, this encompasses thousands of users dispersed across 27 locations worldwide. The work in question is mission-critical: DCGS ISR drives mission planning and direction, drawing in data from across multiple intelligence platforms and sensors.
These are technical challenges associated with maintaining network integrity for all this diverse information across these disparate systems and sensors. "Not all of these sites are configured exactly the same and the details really matter," Wilson said. "It may have the same Cisco switch and the same Dell server and the same NetApp storage, but the exact configuration of all those pieces will have a dramatic impact on performance."
Zenoss may poll 4,000 metrics to chart performance of a single switch, "and all it takes is one admin to upload a single bad configuration to take down the whole thing," he said.
At the same time, network performance management correlates closely to cybersecurity concerns, especially in a mission-critical environment like DCGS. Any effort to track and report on the health of the network also must be responsive to the possibility of malicious intrusion.
"In [an] environment like DCGS, where security is paramount, the natural first step is for performance-and-availability alerts that go to the security team. If we see a performance problem here, the security needs to be able to determine whether they need to worry about that or whether it correlates to other things they are tracking," Wilson said.
An open architecture facilitates by making all the pieces more readily interoperable. This in turn helps ensure the Air Force can keep DCGSs on the cutting edge as new and better networking solutions emerge in the marketplace.
"The concept of an open architecture is that it allows you to be best in breed," Wilson said. "You can always choose the technology or the tool you need for a given problem, so that as technology evolves, you can adapt."
