US Military Drives Storage Innovation

The U.S. government's decision to throw money at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although potentially bad news for many technology vendors, is boosting the development of cutting-edge storage systems.

This is the message from analyst firm Input, which released a report on the Department of Defense's shifting spending priorities today.

The Defense Authorization Bill, which was recently passed by Congress, allows the DOD to spend up to $679 billion in fiscal year 2008, including $189 billion in supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"A lot of the items that are funded are more net-centric, embedded systems-type technologies," says Lauren Jones, principal analyst at Input, explaining that the military is looking to embed GIS systems within body armor and develop "smart" battlefield sensors. "That type of technology is siphoning off funding from more traditional technology implementations."

Whereas the DOD's overall spending is expected to increase by 8.4 percent next year, spending on traditional IT gear, such as PCs and business application software, will increase by just 5.5 percent over the same period, according to Input.This may spell bad news for many vendors, but Jones expects storage to be front and center in the war on terror. "A lot of the war fighter technologies require storage on the back end," she says. "Especially in our image-hungry world, there are so many bandwidth-hungry applications... Anything that has to do with global positioning and Geographic Information Systems, where they are capturing multiple real-time images and doing analysis of live video feeds, all of these are driving demand for storage."

Storage will be needed to feed the U.S. military's constant need for up-to-the-minute intelligence information. In particular, there is growing demand for rapid analysis and storage of masses of data, according to Jones.

Although the U.S. military plays its technology cards close to its chest, some storage vendors have already started to develop specialist systems for capturing and analyzing military and intelligence data. Stealth-mode startup Exponential Storage, for example, has been quietly building a file-sharing solution targeted at the military and government sectors.

Based in a National Security Agency-sponsored technology incubator, Exponential's software is designed to be bundled with off-the-shelf storage hardware and sold to users looking to handle large volumes of digital data.

The startup's CEO, Wick Keating, told Byte & Switch that, initially, the technology is likely to be used for the storage of digital images from satellites and reconnaissance aircraft. "It could also be used to store communications intercepts, scanned documents, and information from remote sensors," he adds."The amount of digital information that war fighters and intelligence planners have to look at to do their jobs is exploding," explains Keating, adding that his firm recently built a 60-Tbyte prototype of its storage solution.

Input analyst Jones says that, although currently cloaked in secrecy, these technologies will eventually find their way into enterprises, much the same way as another defense technology, GPS, is now found in millions of civilian vehicles.

Long-term, the DOD's attempts to analyze and store complex data could therefore feed into the development of similar systems for the enterprise market.

"The technologies are becoming more advanced in analyzing changes in real-time images," says Jones, explaining that this could be particularly useful for oil and gas firms monitoring the perimeters of their facilities.

Exponential's Keating agrees that the intelligence sector is driving technology change. "There's around 500,000 security cameras in London, they are running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and all that information has to be stored," he says.The Maryland-based vendor is already planning to extend its storage technology from the military arena into the healthcare sector, where it could be used to handle MRIs and other data-intensive images. "Medical research generates huge amounts of unstructured data, and we're already having some discussions in that area," says Keating.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.