An Ocean & Marine Engineering Firm, providing analysis, engineering development, fabrication and installation of undersea systems; Project agent for the United States Navy.
Under-Ocean Nuclear Detonation Monitoring System
Client
Issue
The United States Navy required development of a monitoring system to detect oceanic nuclear detonations for use at specific high-risk regions around the world. The system was designed to utilize custom-made products as well as readily-available “off-the-shelf” components that could be used in conjunction as a cost-saving measure. A foreign facility was constructed directly off-shore to house all regulating equipment. This facility needed networking equipment, servers, a monitoring system, and an intrusion detection system to meet all design requirements and project specifications. All equipment components were to be designed, installed, and tested in the United States, then disassembled, packed and shipped to a foreign country for permanent installation.
Goal
The goal of the project was for an entity to design and install the network and server infrastructure to support the production system. Included in this goal was the configuration and installation of a monitoring system that would alert on environmental changes and potential system issues. The equipment was tasked with automatic shutdown and startup requirements that were dependent on the detection of various environmental data points such as power failures and temperature change.
As a part of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) international treaty, the system would detect under-ocean activity then send correlating data to a national data center for processing and nuclear detonation confirmation. The system required high fault tolerance, high levels of automation, and acute security controls to manage auditing, access and authorization. Rigorous government cybersecurity methodologies (STIGs) were implemented to harden security for software, hardware, and physical and logical architectures to further reduce vulnerabilities.
Solution
Compass Consulting was sought out and brought to the project to configure Cisco switches that would provide network connectivity as well as setup of the environmental monitoring phase of the project, utilizing an APC Netbotz platform. Upon completion of these initial project phases, Compass Consulting was then tasked with installing the server infrastructure using VMware coupled with vSAN technology. VMware was installed on blade servers as the hypervisor; several RedHat Linux servers were then deployed to run proprietary and commercial software to support the project.
As part of the implementation phase of the project, Compass Consulting was required to maintain a strict documenting procedure in Ventura, California to ensure that the system could be replicated and implemented at other facilities around the world. Because the newly-designed system would need ongoing maintenance going forward, Compass was also tasked with writing maintenance documentation to be used after the project’s deployment.
To meet the project’s fault-tolerance requirements, VMware with High-Availability (HA) was deployed to provide hardware layer redundancy, as all data gathering software lacked redundancy and fault tolerance thresholds.
To meet project specifications for automated start-up and shutdown, Compass Consulting implemented a method of TICK stack (influxdata.com) for metrics collection. Thresholds were set against these metrics to trigger alerts and/or engage a staged shutdown or startup process with zero manual intervention.
Competencies
VMware, vSAN, High Availability, TICK stack, Red Hat Linux, Cisco IOS, NetBotz, LDAP
Result
Development of a ground-up built system to meet United States Government agency standards that would deploy a fully autonomous system to detect and monitor oceanic events, determine if said events were naturally or unnaturally occurring (i.e. nuclear detonation), then alert the necessary agencies.