For many years, military-system designers relied solely on direct attached storage (DAS) devices when they needed to deploy data storage on military platforms.

Trying to strike a balance between power and security with data-at-rest in the field – and doing it all within a highly constrained space in an environment with dirt and moisture that threatens to damage expensive equipment – is a tall order indeed.

Non-Volatile Memory Express is fast, small, and lightweight, yet it still has something to prove when it comes to ruggedization, thermal performance, and power consumption.

Awards are in three tiers -- ranging from platinum, the highest, to the gold awards, and finally to the silver awards.

The “big data problem” – too much raw data coming too fast over too many channels – remains sizable in both the defense arena and in the commercial realm, but currently entities from both sides are making consistent efforts to chip away at it.

As the U.S. Navy increases its investment in its fleet of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUV), suppliers of rugged commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) subsystems, providing solutions for mission computers, network switches, and routers, and data storage are meeting the needs of these unique platforms.

Honeywell and Curtiss-Wright are making fast progress in bringing ‘black box in the sky’ functionality to their nextgen flight recorders.

Rugged data storage systems for aerospace and defense applications are moving to new data interfaces for unparalleled speed and capacity, while trusted computing and information security are driving trends.