Adapting, designing, modifying and certifying innovations from the wider technology industry for the specific demands of the airliner environment is a key challenge for digitalising aviation. Thales’ new blade-based Onboard Data Center brings a modern architecture and cloud technologies to the aircraft, and we sat down with Kurt Weidemeyer, vice president of product delivery for digital services, to learn more.
As with many new technologies, the benefits of Thales’ Onboard Data Center (ODC) stemmed initially from solutions created for inflight entertainment. Thales is one of the longstanding leaders in the field, with a substantial installation base across airlines.
“One of the issues we have today with traditional inflight entertainment is that you have this little four MCU [multiple control unit] server, and you have to replicate those and have multiple servers on an aircraft. When one of them fails, you have to have an extra one, just so that if one fails, you can go back to the other two or three, depending on the size of the aircraft. But it’s hard to upgrade. It’s also not very resilient,” Weidemeyer tells us.
While failure of an inflight entertainment system might be a frustration for passengers, failure of a modern onboard digitalisation backbone is a greater issue for airline operations, spurring demand for more resilient and capable systems.
“If you look at the data centres of the world, Amazon and Microsoft, they simply have a rack with blades,” Weidemeyer explains. “They have special software that distributes compute and storage resource across those blades. That’s what we’ve done with the onboard data centre: it’s a solution that has a blade architecture. It actually has ten blades, and these blades, just like in a datacenter, are hot swappable.”
Blade server architecture consists of a chassis that contains processor, memory, storage and everything else needed for the server. The concept is tried and tested in the wider tech industry, with key benefits around performance, upgradeability, and redundancy.
“We have full redundancy: we’ve got two network blades, even though you only need one, two power blades, even though you only need one, and six compute and storage blades, even though you can actually run the solution on one. We wanted to make sure we have more capability there,” Weidemeyer emphasises.
Thales’ ODC concept includes the multi-blade architecture, partition file systems for both storage files and executable files, plus redundancy via those structures, systems and associated algorithms. It also offers the ability to connect to cloud architecture, as well as built-in blade lifecycle analysis and system health monitoring.
“The whole key is we have built a solution that has full resilience for redundancy. For operational services, we’ve also built a software platform that it’s easy to integrate and add solutions — real time. You don’t have to recertify the whole solution. So, you can actually have a partition for inflight entertainment, and you can also have a side that does operational data,” Weidemeyer says. “We are certifying this to the design authority level E, so as for cabin inflight entertainment type solutions, but it also means we can read from any LRU [line-replaceable unit] system on the aircraft — we can’t write to the cockpit, but we can read and get the data to do real time health. We can also write to those items that don’t need a higher design authority level.”
Altogether, the system is gaining substantial traction, including winning this year’s Crystal Cabin Award — the linchpin awards of the cabin interior and onboard product segment of the industry — in the category of Cabin Systems, Materials and Components.
“As we talk to OEMs and airlines, especially the OEMs, they’re starting to go down the path and realising this solution is powerful enough: it can do a lot more than inflight entertainment. They’re looking at it and asking a lot of questions about how else they can use this solution,” Weidemeyer says.
Author: John Walton
Published: 26 October 2023
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