Making waves

LOVELAND — Terra Soft Solutions, a Loveland-based reseller of Apple products, has left terra firma and gone to sea.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin has picked Terra Soft to supply 260 Apple Xserve machines, which Lockheed will install on U.S. Navy submarines.

Terra Soft earned the $1.9 million deal because it figured how to make the Apple servers seaworthy, technologically speaking.

Specifically, Terra Soft engineers — with Apple’s consent — outfitted the Xserves with a Linux operating system, replacing Apple’s proprietary Mac OS X system.

The Linux system — Terra Soft’s own system is called Yellow Dog Linux — better meets the Navy’s needs for producing real-time sonar images, said Kai Staats, co-founder and CEO of Terra Soft.

Additionally, Terra Soft — working with another local subcontractor — managed to saw off the Xserves, reducing the 30-inch chassis to 17-3/4 inches, adapting the machines to the limited space in a submarine.

A key feature of the Lockheed-Terra Soft package is its performance density. The adapted Xserves deliver twice the computing power in half the space of the previous Navy systems, Staats said.

“The goal is to continually increase performance but reduce power consumption,” he said. “That means reduced heat.”

Since early this year, Staats said his company has invested about half its time in fulfilling the contract, which is managed by Lockheed’s Undersea Warfare Group in Manassas, Va. Terra Soft expects to complete delivery on the Xserve machines by the end of October.

Terra Soft’s initial share of the contract covers the hardware purchase. But Staats expects a continuing revenue stream.

“The follow-on service is more,” he said.

Furthermore, Terra Soft hopes to be at the head of the line when the Navy looks to update the technology on more subs.

The Navy tries to replace computer systems on its subs every 18 to 24 months as a means to keep up with the latest technology, Staats said.

“Our understanding is that next year, another 260 units will be procured again for the other half of the fleet,” he said.

Terra Soft likely has an advantage for the second half of the Lockheed deal because the Navy is not inclined to shift platforms midway through the contract, Staats said.

The deal also puts a shine on Apple, which introduced the rack-mounted Xserve model last summer to compete with established server manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

First of all, the 260-unit sale is the largest Xserve contract ever by an Apple reseller. Secondly, Terra Soft’s ability to outfit Xserves with Linux — an open-source operating system that can be modified by users — gives Apple more sales flexibility. Large enterprise users often favor the open-source possibilities.

The deal also gets Apple in the door with the U.S. government.

“The fact that it is for the U.S. military hopefully bodes well for future Mac sales to what is one of the world’s largest users of computers,´ said an article in the online MacObserver, which monitors Apple business.

“With Apple fighting to gain traction in the server and corporate space, any sale that gets that Apple hardware installed is absolutely a Good Thing,” MacObserver added.

Don Marti, editor-in-chief at Linux Journal, said the Terra Soft deal reflects the fact that Linux “is catching on rapidly with defense contracts.”

“What I’m seeing with defense applications is that developers have very specific requirements that need to be met,” Marti said. “Proprietary operating systems out there don’t give you the flexibility to reconfigure for a military environment.”

Terra Soft’s work on the Lockheed contract started two years ago. A major hurdle in the process was developing the prototype of the modified Xserve, which took three months by itself.

The prototype then had to survive various tests, including resistance to G-force compression that can occur when a sub is under attack.

Terra Soft also helped Lockheed develop the protocol for a sailor to swap out a bad Xserve unit with a replacement unit.

“We helped Lockheed design the entire process, from the physical replacement of the chassis to putting a new one in,” Staats said.

The Terra Soft-Lockheed team even had to develop specialized software so a sailor could use a laptop to communicate with the Xserves to figure out which machine was in need of replacement.

The sale puts Terra Soft among the top 5 percent of Apple’s VARs (value added resellers) worldwide. The company’s sales grew from $840,000 last year to nearly $3 million this year.

“From our standpoint, it’s coming into our own,´ said Staats, who started the company with partner Dan Burcaw in 1999. “We’ve been around four and a half years and moved in and out of three or four different business models.

“In the last calendar year we’re finding our feet again.”

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