Curtiss-Wright solutions, including PacStar 451 and PacStar Modular Data Center (MDC), will host Rancher Multi Cluster Manager and Harvester
Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions division announced on April 17 a strategic alliance and reseller agreement with Rancher Government Solutions (RGS), the leading provider of Kubernetes and container management solutions to the U.S. Government. Working in collaboration, the two companies will bring Kubernetes to the tactical edge, extending the public, private, hybrid, and government cloud, from all leading cloud service providers, to disrupted, disconnected, intermittent and low-bandwidth (DDIL) environments while maintaining stringent U.S. Government Security Regulations. This will, for the first time, provide warfighters at the edge with access to the enterprise-class cloud capabilities they have come to rely on, regardless of connectivity, and enable users to better manage critical workloads and more easily deploy applications from the cloud to the edge.
“Our warfighters have come to rely on cloud computing capabilities, but until now, connectivity issues have hindered their availability at the tactical edge. We are very excited to partner with Rancher Government Solutions to bring their secure enterprise-class cloud capabilities hosted on the PacStar 400-Series platform to the tactical edge for the first time,” said Brian Perry, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions Division. “We look forward to extending our relationship with Rancher Government Solutions to develop edge solutions for our customer base. Our plans include bringing their technology to additional Curtiss-Wright compute platforms, including the newly released size, weight, and power optimized PacStar 200-Series, the ultra-rugged Parvus DuraCOR product family and our broad range of 3U and 6U VPX form factor SOSA aligned solutions.”
“We are proud to be working with Curtiss-Wright to deliver transformational solutions focused on the U.S. Government military and civilian use cases and tailored to the unique demands of the Tactical Edge,” said Ben Zifrony, RVP of Channels and Alliances at Rancher Government Solutions. “Our combined solutions are not just about adapting to the edge but thriving in it, delivering a cloud-native platform that is secure, scalable, and sustainable, across Curtiss-Wright’s compute platforms and regardless of the operating environment.”
As a result of this collaboration, PacStar 400-Series tactical communications solutions, such as the PacStar 451 Server Module and PacStar MDC, will be able to host the Rancher Multi Cluster Manager (MCM) and Harvester hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) technologies, to support both container and virtual machine workloads at the tactical edge.
Rancher, an independent U.S. entity, offers industry-leading compatibility with vast numbers of containers. Both Rancher MCM and Rancher’s Kubernetes distribution, RKE2, have a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) written Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG), and the PacStar hardware solutions are included in the STIG-ready profile. Rancher supports leading cloud services including Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE.
