Raytheon, Dell EMC leverage Pivotal to modernize the Air Force

Cloud‑native patterns are a modern approach to application architecture, development and delivery that has emerged as a natural response to the changes in business needs and infrastructure capabilities. This new model directly increases the speed and agility of application delivery for IT organizations and has proven its benefits for startups and established enterprises alike.

Pivotal Ready Architecture is the fastest way to get Pivotal Cloud Foundry up and running in your data center. Accelerate your transformation with an “it just works” experience. PRA (Pivotal Ready Architecture), supports Pivotal Application Service (PAS) and Pivotal Container Service (PKS).

Customers around the world are modernizing and accelerating their software delivery with PCF. The platform is built on open technologies that enjoy broad industry momentum. PCF pairs enterprise-grade security, scalability, high availability, and operational control with a streamlined developer workflow that accelerates application delivery.

PRA provides a tested, validated reference architecture on which to deploy a highly available enterprise‑grade developer platform. Built on hyper‑converged VxRail, PRA delivers automated lifecycle management of the infrastructure, a critical element in accelerating your transformation into a digital business with infrastructure that allows you to start small and grow.

That’s why a recent collaboration between Raytheon Co. and Dell EMC to deploy new software applications for the U.S. Air Force could be a candidate for recognition in the Guinness World Records.

“By the time you’re fielding capability, it could be five years from when the need was actually identified - and in that five years the technology has probably changed,” said David Appel, vice president of C2, space and intelligence, Defense and Civil solutions, at Raytheon. “We were able to deploy new applications using the Pivotal Ready Architecture within 150 days and get those out worldwide to the field.

Appel was part of a two-year effort between Raytheon and Dell to modernize the Air Force. A key element involved Pivotal Ready Architecture, an appliance stack that included Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware virtualization running on the Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure.

Pivotal Ready Architecture was applied to a tanker refuelling process for airborne flights, which previously involved eight hours of planning on a whiteboard, as per Appel.

“It’s been about transforming the culture of the way that the Department of Defense does software,” Appel explained. “It saved over $200,000 per day in fuel costs. More importantly, it’s more efficient in protecting the safety of the flight crews.”

The Raytheon/Dell EMC collaboration also highlighted a process called transformation without tradeoffs. It’s how organizations can embrace change in areas such as application development and infrastructure management without having to take a significant step backwards.

“Transformation without tradeoffs is a big deal,” Shneorson said. “Today, every developer, every information technology person can’t wait to go and be DevOps. We offload the burden from them, and they’re freed up to do cooler stuff.” For more the live coverage can be seen over, the CUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event.