MOORESTOWN, N.J., 11 July 2005. Formation, Inc. announced today that its ToughDisk 3500 Rugged Hard Disk has been selected by Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems & Sensors (MS2) to provide rugged data storage for Maritime Patrol Aircraft in support of the U.S. Coast Guard's Integrated Deepwater System, a program to recapitalize the Coast Guard's aging cutters, electronics and aircraft.
ToughDisk is a key component of the company's System Integrated Storage Units, which offer storage capacity of over 400 gigabytes. The units will contain all system software and data on the CN-235 aircraft. With 2,000-nautical mile range and 10-hour flight endurance, the CN-235 will be used to perform surveillance, search and rescue and transport duties suitable for both traditional Coast Guard missions as well as homeland security missions.
"Formation offered us the best technical solution for the value," said Jim Kalb, program manager at Lockheed Martin MS2. "We needed a data storage solution that performs reliably in harsh environmental conditions. We selected ToughDisk because it can handle our aggressive warm-up requirements and the extreme high and low temperatures of this application."
ToughDisk rugged hard disks are high-performance, removable data storage units built specifically to withstand extreme temperature, shock, vibration, humidity and dust conditions. The TD3500 is a rugged drop-in replacement for standard 3.5-inch, low-profile disk drives with 73 or 100 GBytes capacity and SCSI or ATA interfaces.
"ToughDisk rugged hard disks have been selected for several military applications including manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft, submarine communications systems and ship based weapons systems," said R. Nim Evatt, Formation CEO and president. "They have also been selected for commercial applications including use with a new inflight entertainment content loader for commercial airlines. Both military and commercial customers find Formation's rugged hard disk product line attractive because of their significant cost and capacity advantages over solid state storage."
Formation will manufacture the storage units at its Moorestown, N.J. production facility. Delivery is slated to begin in August 2005.
The Integrated Deepwater System (IDS) is a multi-year, multi-billion dollar program to modernize and replace the Coast Guard's aging ships and aircraft, and improve command and control and logistics systems. It is the largest recapitalization effort in the history of the Coast Guard. When complete, the interoperable IDS system will include three classes of new cutters and their associated small boats, a new fixed-wing manned aircraft fleet, upgraded helicopters, and both cutter-based and land-based unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). All of these highly capable assets are linked with C4ISR (command, control, communications and computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) systems, and are supported by a new and far-reaching integrated logistics systems. IDS is essential to the support the Coast Guard's many missions, key among which is domestic Homeland Security.
In June 2002, the U.S. Coast Guard awarded the contract for IDS to Integrated Coast Guard Systems, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin employs about 130,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services. The corporation reported 2004 sales of $35.5 billion.
Formation, Inc. provides a broad range of products and services to the aerospace, data communications, defense and transportation industries including ToughDisk Rugged Hard Disks, Advanced Integrated Recorders (AIR) for air traffic control (ATC) and air defense/C4I applications, avionics-class servers, rugged wired and wireless networks for commercial and military applications and the Mobile Vehicle Tracker for monitoring, mapping and reporting mobile fleet operations. The company has delivered over 11,000 high performance RAID systems, over 1,500 avionics-class servers for mission-critical applications including streaming multimedia (e.g., reconnaissance data) and aircraft health information, over 110,000 other avionics-class products and developed and qualified 15 different systems for commercial aviation applications. Formation also provides custom engineering and manufacturing services. For more information, see www.formation.com.
