CANES and the Cloud

Written by Kevin Jackson

MIT 2009 Volume: 13 Issue: 11 (December)

During the first quarter of 2010, the Navy is expected to make the first selection for the Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise System (CANES). CANES is just one component of the Navy’s overall strategy for its future information technology infrastructure.

Referred to collectively as the Naval Networking Environment 2016 (NNE 2016), its other components are:

• Navy Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN)-Base Level Information Infrastructure

• Overseas Network (ONE-NET)

• Marine Corps Enterprise Networks (MCEN)

• Navy “excepted networks”—health care, training and education networks that will not be included in the NGEN enclave.

The NNE is envisioned as a fully integrated, enterprise-wide networking environment where data and services are ubiquitously available to naval users. It will ensure that all naval networks, including the future afloat networking infrastructure, are fully interoperable.

As the single afloat component, CANES comprises two main subprograms. The physical infrastructure, known as the Common Computing Environment (CCE), consolidates all the hardware, racks, servers and communications media for shipboard applications. Operational networks included in this consolidation include: Integrated Shipboard Network Systems (ISNS); Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System (CENTRIXS); Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) Local Area Network; Submarine Local Area Network (SUBLAN); and Video Information Exchange System (VIXS).

The Afloat Core Services subprogram, often referred to as CANES SOA (service oriented architecture), is a consolidation of applications in use today. System applications expected to migrate into the CANES network infrastructure include Global Combat Support System-Maritime, Distributed Common Ground System- Navy and Navy Tactical Command Support System.

In many ways, CANES represents a significant change in the way the Navy procures C4ISR capabilities. By using proven technology and industry standards, CANES will provide a common fleetwide computing environment. This approach will deliver C4ISR capability as applications instead of complete systems, harvesting significant savings for the Navy while accelerating the delivery of war fighting capability to the fleet.

According to Vice Admiral Harry B. Harris, deputy chief of naval operations for communications networks and deputy chief information officer, CANES will provide 75,000 seats on 192 ships and submarines and at nine maritime operation centers across the fleet. CANES also represents the Navy’s response to fleet demands for a robust tactical network.

The program is expected to reduce the footprint of physical infrastructure on ships through virtualization, Commander John Sprague, CANES assistant program manager has indicated. Multiple independent virtual operating systems will run on a single physical computer, increasing the computing power that can be achieved and maximizing the service’s investment in hardware and other physical resources.

CANES will enforce configuration management through a system based on the Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion model used by the submarine community. Hardware will be updated every four years and software (operating systems and systems management) will be updated every two years.

SHARED RESOURCES

In April 2009, Navy Chief Information Officer Rob Carey broached the use of cloud computing within the Navy. In summary, cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, such as networks, servers, storage, applications, and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Carey has suggested that cloud computing seems to be a logical step forward to make computing more effective and efficient, and that both NGEN and CANES programs would leverage cloud computing. He also has described a future of “grey clouds” on each ship.

His vision, however, also raises some important questions regarding a possible transition:

• How do we get our present NMCI, ONE-NET and MCEN architectures to move toward the CANES architecture?

• How do we get the NNE 2016 to move toward and embrace the cloud?

• How broad and reliable must connectivity be for the cloud to work?

Undaunted by these challenges, Carey has consistently presented a view that the Navy must take advantage of this transformational opportunity to leverage its computing assets as part of NNE 2016. While recognizing that the Navy’s ships at sea and Marine war fighting units present challenges unique to the naval service, he views most garrison environments as prime candidates to test cloud computing. Citing CANES as a representational step towards his goals, he has outlined parallel paths of defining where the cloud computing model is applicable, and defining a business case to develop new applications within this new cloud model.

The Navy is already making tentative moves towards cloud computing. In a visionary effort managed by San Diego State University, the service is using a Google cloud computing platform to promote better interactions and results when disasters strike. Called InRelief.org, this collaborative environment is used to promote information sharing between international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, government organizations, and military groups responding to a natural or man-made disaster.

During the annual Trident Warrior exercise, a simulated shipboard communications and network environment was used to see if a commercial cloud computing platform could actually be used at sea. Working with Dataline, a cloud computing solution integrator, and Amazon Web Services, the experiment summary included findings that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud commercial Infrastructure as a Service platform: effectively provided global connectivity to support potential DoD applications; supported virtualization of resource-intensive applications; provided compute and storage capability that operated as expected and could be used to meet mission critical DON application and storage requirements; and supported operations that were satisfactory under typical satellite impairment, and the shipboard network was not saturated.

Not to be outdone, the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division’s Geophysics Branch at China Lake, Calif., recently let a contract to use Internet-based cloud computing capabilities to research and forecast weather conditions around the world. The system uses a high-performance network of Linux computers.

ADOPTION STRATEGY

If CANES is the Navy’s transition to virtualization and SOA, one could argue that it should also include a cloud computing adoption strategy. This line of thought, however, ignores those that see cloud computing as nothing more than another hype cycle gone wild.

The arguments from this camp claim that the Navy has no need for the Internet-scale solution that cloud computing was designed to support. They also cite the need to partition, segregate and manage internal information domains in order to protect them from malevolent external actors. Additionally, it is argued that the Navy’s unique mission would preclude it from ever relying on this type of shore-based information infrastructure.

Counter-arguments point out that the Navy already relies on a wealth of external information sources in order to maintain contextual and situational awareness, including shore-based information infrastructures such as the cable television news networks. International dynamics have also highlighted new and varied collaboration and information sharing requirements.

The lack of prior knowledge of whose collaboration will be crucial to tomorrow’s operational success argues strongly against any type of exclusive internal information domain. This need to share and collaborate also increases the likelihood that your information and data will use infrastructure provided by others.

Like it or not, the Navy cannot isolate itself from the foundational informational technology changes driven by cloud computing. A relentless path toward exascale information operations, driven primarily by increased reliance on the analysis of unstructured data, is already heralding the decline of the relational database. In a recent move designed to “elevate information as a main battery of our war fighting capabilities,” the Navy has also established and confirmed the first deputy chief of naval operations for information dominance.

Cloud computing technologies and techniques were born from the need to address critical information management needs. If CANES truly does represent an enterprise-wide adoption of a common computing environment and SOA, then the development of Navy clouds may be a foregone conclusion. Cloud computing is not a fad. It represents a paradigm shift in IT, and SOA can serve as an on-ramp to cloud computing. ♦

Kevin Jackson is vice president of Dataline and leader of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium’s Cloud Computing Working Group.

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