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The mission of the 86th Airlift Wing extends globally as the Department of Defense’s premier power projection platform and the U.S. Air Force’s largest mobility hub, also known as the Global Gateway.
To most, the Global Gateway is represented by the activity surrounding Ramstein’s flightline. But the 86th AW has more than physical runways to execute its mission, it also has virtual ones connecting communication services with ten combatant commands across the globe.
The 86th Communications Squadron leads and manages this mission by ensuring cyber capabilities reach Airmen and Guardians in the United States, Africa, Middle East and Asia.
The DOD recognized our unique mission at Ramstein by naming us one of the Core Enterprise Data Centers across the military services in 2019. CEDC is more than a title, it comes with a set of architectural standards for meeting reliability and redundancy ratings. These ratings reflect the importance of ensuring information is there when the warfighter needs it and is now changing how the 86th CS executes its mission.
“This is the way forward in preventing network core services from having prolonged blackout periods,” said U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jordan Anthony, 86th CS data center noncommissioned officer in charge. “Minimizing downtime is always our ultimate goal.”
Any journey starts with the first step. For us, it focused on building a physical COOP for data systems supporting Ramstein’s mission.
In what can only be called a multi-unit effort, we worked with U.S. Air Forces in Europe to secure funds while OSI donated a sizable chunk of one of their buildings to house the COOP.
The 86th Civil Engineering Squadron assisted in obtaining the necessary permits and approvals for new generators, as well as ensuring the designs and construction stayed within or exceeded both German and U.S. codes. We also partnered with the 38th Engineering Squadron at Tinker Air Force Base to establish the initial design and contracting documents.
Two years and $15 million later, we completed not only USAFE’s first networking COOP, but also a disaster recovery site at Ramstein. We now meet two of three objectives for being one of DOD’s CEDCs, and we nailed the landing too.
Earlier this year, DOD CIO’s office confirmed the 86th AW’s COOP is the DOD’s one and only certified Rated-3 datacenter supporting both unclassified and classified networking systems. According to DOD and commercial guidance, Rating-3 provides a fault tolerant capability. Fault tolerant is a nerdy way of saying everything within, from power to heating ventilation and air conditioning; UPS and fiber optic connectivity, is duplicated. It’s designed to deliver up to a 99.999 percent uptime rating for any equipment residing with the datacenter.
What’s the difference between our COOP and an ordinary datacenter? The COOP changes the expected unscheduled down time of the facility from 28 hours a year to a mere 26 minutes. This is a significant change illustrating the leap the 86th AW just took has been noticed by key USAFE leaders.
“The men and women of the 86th CS have worked tirelessly for the last 5 years to modernize and improve our deteriorating communications infrastructure in the Kaiserslautern Military Community,” said Susana June, USAFE Emerging Capabilities Branch chief. “These critical efforts are in support of the many multifaceted organizations and mission partner environments relying on Ramstein’s infrastructure to continue their missions successfully. Together we can continue to make great strides in leading the way for USAFE!”
So, what’s next for our virtual runway?
This year we’ve partnered with USAFE to begin renovating our primary datacenter with a $10 million investment. It will effectively bring all of our datacenters out from what seems like the Stone Age to today, where we’ll be parallel with industry leaders. We’ve also began duplicating services across multiple locations, ensuring each instance can keep the 86th AW and its mission partners in the fight.
Together, this is how the members of the 86th CS and our mission partners are improving the 86th AW’s virtual Global Gateway connecting DOD’s premier power projection platform to the world.
