Defense agencies and contractors view the data center as a crucial operational hub encompassing a wide range of technologies and services.

Challenge
Defense agencies and contractors have always been enthusiastic technology innovators and adopters. In the 1950s, defense organizations were among the very first computer users. A decade or so later, a military communications project exploring the limits of network fault tolerance formed the foundation of today's Internet. In the 21st century, defense organizations expect their data centers to help them explore virtualization, cloud computing, sensor monitoring and many other advanced technologies.

Security, which has always been a major consideration for defense sector enterprises, has acquired added importance in recent years. In a post-9/11 world, protecting physical assets, including IT systems, has become a top priority - even when the assets in question are located thousands of miles away from the nearest war zone. Sitting on the cyberwar front line, defense agencies and contractors also require the most stringent virtual security protections. Additionally, since defense organizations are always working to keep a step ahead of current and potential adversaries, they require access to cutting-edge IT resources as soon as they become available.

Like most enterprises, defense organizations and contractors use data centers to handle an array of mundane business tasks. But unlike the average data center user, they also expect their facility to support advanced research, modeling, simulations, and data analysis.

Working in a wide range of areas on the technology edge, defense organizations expect their data center to provide plenty of everything, including processing, storage, bandwidth, power, cooling and security - and all at the absolute highest quality levels. That's hardly surprising. After all, defense organizations invented the term "Mil Spec." Since many military systems operate on a "failure isn't an option basis," a growing number of defense organizations are turning to virtualization to ensure high availability for their most critical IT assets. Defense market leaders understand that virtualization creates flexibilities that can be leveraged to increase redundancy - such as by having virtual failover machines in standby mode.

Solution
IO provides a modular data center system that is ideal for defense agencies looking to deploy high-availability applications in a variety of global theaters. IO.Anywhere® can be rapidly deployed and is engineered to withstand both environmental and man-made threats. A compartmentalized architecture keeps a service event in any one module from impacting the rest of the system. And with remote environmental and security monitoring, IO.Anywhere® installations allow for a high-degree of control.

Learn more on how IO can help.