Airbus Defence and Space has been commissioned to install a new IT infrastructure for NATO’s Allied Air Command headquarters at Ramstein air base, which is responsible for monitoring the air space over North Germany, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea and for controlling NATO air operations.

The new IT infrastructure was commissioned by the German procurement authority BAAINBw (Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support) acting on behalf of NATO.

The main goal of the project is to expand and modernise the IT infrastructure of NATO’s Secret LAN (NS), Mission Secret LAN (MS) and Public LAN (PA). This will primarily involve virtualising user workstations and implementing a voice over IP solution. A comprehensive training programme focusing on virtualisation will also be included.

Prior to this, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) concept was defined and implemented, together with NATO Ramstein, on the basis of blade servers and VMware Horizon as part of the Urgent Requirement 2 (UR2) project to form the basis for the UR5 project.