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Keel, the TrueTactical™ Hypervisor for the Edge

Keel, the TrueTactical™ Hypervisor for the Edge

Keel, the TrueTactical Hypervisor

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Keel, the TrueTactical™ Hypervisor for the Edge

At the tactical edge, things are never as easy as they should be. One of the biggest challenges is configuring and managing disparate servers, networks, and connectivity for always changing mission requirements. To ease the burden and stress of maintaining always-on mission systems, Klas developed Keel. A lightweight OS designed for the tactical edge.

 

A lightweight OS

Keel is an operating system (OS) developed and maintained by Klas. As a lightweight linux-based OS, Keel manages the computer hardware and software in the most efficient way possible. Keel is packaged as a lean OS.  The result is no unnecessary software packages and libraries causing bloat.

Keel is highly optimized to ensure that the end-user has the maximum available physical hardware resources i.e. processor cores, storage, memory and power. However, when compared to traditional OS types, Keel consumes the least resources. This is significant for low-SWaP compute modules at the Tactical edge, as there are more compute resources available to run mission critical applications.

For a quick overview in 60 seconds, checkout the Keel video –

 

Built rugged for the Tactical Edge

When OS is mentioned, folks naturally think of Windows, MacOS or Linux. The purpose of these OS types is to make today’s hardware consumable for all, and designed for controlled environments where reliable power is taken for granted. Keel is designed to be tactical, and the custom Linux distribution is built rugged. The result is minimum resource consumption, and an OS that is sudden power failure tolerant.

 

Data Operations for Mission Sucess

At the Tactical Edge, mission success is dependent on data intelligence which results in the ability to sense and make sense of what is happening and relies on the ability to efficiently and effectively share information between systems and humans.

The key data pillars that an OS at the Tactical Edge should support include –

  • Collection (the ability to network or connect different machines)
  • Processing (support the software to visualize, manipulate, or interact with the data)
  • Movement (communicate and disseminate the data of interest securely)

Traditionally, the above functions were delivered as separate boxes in the network. However, with Keel all this capability is delivered in one OS package that can be used in any low-SWaP module that supports compute. Keel core functionality includes:

  • Networking – route and vSwitching to move data in, out and around the hardware.
  • Hypervisor – manage and share the physical hardware resources, users can run any software stack, or multiple different software stacks as virtual machines (VM).
  • Secure Connectivity – integrated management of wired and wireless modems with built-in firewall to securely access and transmit data over untrusted networks.

As Keel is designed with networking capabilities built-in, the command line structure is familiar to anyone who has configured network devices from vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, making it intuitive and easy to use.

 

The TrueTactical™ Hypervisor

As Keel is sudden power failure tolerant, lightweight, and comes with an integrated KVM-based hypervisor, this makes Keel the only TrueTactical™ Hypervisor available today. Keel’s KVM-based hypervisor supports sharing of the modules physical resources of compute, storage, networking, connectivity and pass-through of serial periphery e.g. USB, CAN, etc. to the hosted VM.

 

Keel delivers the flexibility and ease to deploy multi-tenanted services as hosted VMs at the edge. With integrated routing and virtualized switching capabilities users can quickly and easily create multiple secure and IP segmented networks. Ideal for Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) deployments.

 

Intelligent Routing and Auto-PACE

The function of Keel’s integrated SD-WAN capability is to provide resilient communications at the Tactical Edge. A key capability of Keel SD-WAN is to detect and automatically route traffic over the preferred or best-performing WAN path without human intervention.

 

Keel supports both a basic unidirectional monitoring of the network path, or bidirectional (round-trip) performance monitoring of the complete end-to-end network path on all available WAN connections.

 

A significant advantage to the bidirectional monitoring of the WAN path is that – if a network path becomes congested in one direction, Keel will detect this and seamlessly route the traffic to a higher performing WAN path. This intelligent route capability equates to an automated process for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergence communication (Auto-PACE)1 plans.

 

An OS with security in its DNA

Keel is designed from the ground up to be a secure OS, and is:
  • Available as a single image (.bin) file.
  • Signed with a digital signature for ease of secure updates over the air.
  • NIAP Common Criteria certified as a network device and firewall OS device [CCEVS-VR-VID11436-2024].
  • NSA CSfC component listed [Traffic filtering firewall].

 

Learn more about Keel

 

References:

 

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