Building the C-TOC

Today the #XFORCECTOC is in Austin, TX conducting cyber range exercises with a few of our customers and giving many of our employees the first opportunity to see it. One question I'm getting a lot is "what did it take to build this?" Well, it took about a year and a half and this was done in total secrecy. Even our internal employees had no idea unless they were directly part of the project. The core team had some significant challenges to overcome - how could we ensure we had Internet connectivity anywhere in the world? How could we put a 100TB data center on a truck, keep it powered and cooled indefinitely? How would we keep displays (in one case over 12' in length) from breaking or falling off? What would it take to make it road legal in both the US and in Europe? What would be the implications of ocean ferry and Chunnel crossings? How could we reconfigure the entire data center when it is used for a Cyber Range vs a Red Team Exercise vs responding to an actual incident? These were not simple challenges but a dedicated team of IBMers and several key partners pulled it off.

It all started with a series of dialogs to determine if this was even practical. In the Fire/EMS world they have command posts but rarely anything this large. An initial conversation with experts at American Medical Response gave us some solid ideas of who to work with and

It all started with a conversation with First Responders to determine if the practicality of such a vehicle. In this case, American Medical Response who gave us some keen advice on how to build such a trailer as have EMS command posts all over the . We reached out to the military where they leverage "Jump TOCs" that follow a similar theme. We then gave our technical integrator, Diversified., an incredible challenge. Could we build the entire thing using no spinning platters and all solid state drives? Could we make everything field replaceable and could it bounce around in a truck for the foreseeable future without breaking?

We then went to the cornfields of Iowa where we met with Featherlite Specialty Trailers. Featherlite has built everything from horse trailers to racing trailers and even mobile hospitals. It always gave me a bit of a chuckle every time I would visit their manufacturing line to see this giant technical beast being built next to a horse trailer.... literally.

Once the base trailer was built we went to Kentucky where  Brewco Marketing Group took over and provided all of the branding and finishing touches. The team at Brewco are now traveling the world with us providing the drivers and logistical support to ensure the #XFORCECTOC is always exactly where it needs to be.

Overall a big thank you to everyone at IBM that worked on this project along with all of our vendors that supported us. Below you can find time lapse that Nathan Cook on our team put together that shows the entire build.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrI8S1906Ug