UK air traffic controller lands 6,000-seater VDI on flashy Violin arrays The UK's national air transportation service is basing a 6,000 seat private cloud VDI system on flash arrays from VIOLIN Memory. NATS is the UK's provider of en-route and other air navigation services. It is separate from the Civil Aviation Authority which is the UK’s aviation regulator with responsibilities for airspace …
As someone who has recently left NATS I would like to clarify that the new desktop infrastructure is for the engineering and planning side of the business, not the air traffic control side. The air traffic controllers use custom systems developed within NATS whilst controlling. This project is merely a desktop refresh for the "office workers" within the business.
Let me stress again, this is totally safe and will have no flight impact at all, otherwise the information would not have been released.
The reference to 6000 people was only used by the Register. There are far fewer people in the organisation however a smaller system would have been too small.
There are about 3000 support staff, of which 85% or so are engineers or engineering managers. The rest are Project Planners, HR, Legal, Finance etc. There are about 400 ATCOs on duty at any one time, with three watches throughout the day & night.
These figures are from my memory and may not be completely accurate.
.."security by obscurity" ?
Another country uses X11, Motif and Linux. Not exactly nice looking, not exactly nice APIs, but certainly as reliable as it can get.
It appears NATS uses similar technologies. That is what can be gleaned by some "expert googleing" (ie. not being a fucking idiot at the google command line). I found NATS to use
* MSVC
* web services
• Code development in Jovial, Ada, C and/or C++
• Unix scripts, for example Perl
* Ada
* some RTOS and my best bet is QNX, but maybe it is Integrity
* MS Access (yay !)
Courtesy your friendly Porker Lockhhed-Martin and LinkedIn.
Again, if they think secrecy helps the security of their systems is a very bad philosophy. Most of these systems have a very bad security history (remember the HPUX ping of death ?) and must be protected by strong cryptography (encrypted virtual networks) and a capable security team. Remove all electric interfaces and mass storage. Seal the boxes and glue all cables in place. Ban all personal electronics on premise and enforce that. No WLAN. etc.
..the "standard" commerical Unices, Windows NT versions (up to 7), Linux and MacOS X are NOT real-time capable. At least not "hard realtime capable". I remember HP selling VxWorks on their PA RISC machines as a realtime OS. HPUX would execute on a second processor and be responsible for networking, storing data, interfacing to other systems, running relational databases etc.
As someone posted here, they don't use this virtualized contraption for flight control operations. They use it for their engineers, managers and the beancounters.
I actually read a citrix white paper I think it was where they claimed all kinds of insane savings.... if you read the whole thing at the end the summary mentioned most of the savings was actually outsourcing not the VDI itself. We could never make the math come up in any way that saved us money when we already had a good system management system (altiris) and good processes.
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