PRODUCTIVITY AND BEST PRACTICES: EDITOR’S COLUMN Kevin Parker Senior Contributing Editor
Gone all-in on edge
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The survey indicates respondents look forward to a f there is cloud, there must be edge. Othercomputing environment that blends traditional closedwise use of the industrial Internet of things is loop control with IT-world technologies like virtualization limited to cases where latency and bandwidth and data-hungry applications making use of analytics. constraints don’t come into play. “The traditional DCS — or PLC with SCADA and histoEdge computing can be described as a mesh network rian — is becoming obsolete fast…. Instead, plant devices of micro-data centers that process or store critical data will be provisioned and maintained centrally. We engineer locally while also working in concert with a central data it in the cloud, register the edge device, bind them tocenter or cloud-storage repository. A sophisticated gether and deploy,” said Tim Sowell, global market of single-use and multidirector, digital portfolio strategy, purpose devices for industrial edge Aveva, a Stratus partner. computing has developed rapidly. It’s going to happen Historically speaking, Maynard, Mass.-based Stratus Technologies’ Centralized skills sharing because the economic products often were compared to large It’s the ability to provision and enterprise servers found in data cenmaintain devices centrally that ters, but its latest solution, ztC Edge, should allow companies to move value is so compelling it is better described as a virtualized, forward with edge computing, deautomated platform for industrial edge spite a perceived dearth of personcan’t be resisted. environments. nel with the requisite advanced skill “Our customers today are in an intersets. esting space,” said Jason Andersen, VP While 55% of survey respondents of business line management, Stratus Technologies. “They believe control, process or automation engineering are trying to build towards the future while selectively expertise are core to edge computing success, near 30% maintaining their core operational applications. This means to 40% believe skills related to systems architectures, that they need a different kind of platform that can collect computer networking, cloud computing, data-base data analytics as well as manage current or legacy automa- security, data engineering, data science and application tion technology. ztC is effectively the bridge that translates development are also needed. their existing technologies into the world of cloud service Whether purposed to upgrade SCADA deployments providers like Amazon or Microsoft.” or in the application of statistics-based analytics, edge computing may be the most significant plant-floor advancement in industrial computing since the introduction Quantification as justification of SCADA 30 years ago. In fact, 43% of respondents to Stratus recently released results of a survey of engineers the Stratus survey see edge computing as “a great leap and others involved in edge connectivity, process control forward for process and production environments.” and operational computing environments. The result will be disruption of the industrial computThe edge computing trend report for North America ing space, said Dave Laurello, Stratus CEO, “by generalfound 46% of survey respondents agree that lack of purpose computers in the virtual mode, virtual PCs. education on if, when and how to use edge technology and applications is the foremost barrier to edge-computing It’s going to happen because the economic value is so deployment. At the same time, 53% of survey respondents compelling that it can’t be resisted.” say their companies are actively evaluating or planning These computational resources at the edge can filter edge computing implementations. Meanwhile, roughly or process data so that only what’s needed is transmitone-third still need a plan. ted to enterprise systems in the cloud. IIoT
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www.controleng.com/IIoT
Industrial Internet of Things
NOVEMBER 2019
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