Stratus ztC Edge & Spectro Cloud - Solution Brief

Spectro Cloud and Stratus ztC Edge™:

Simple, secure and resilient Edge Computing for VM and container workloads The challenge

The solution

Organizations are increasingly leveraging Edge Computing in their IT and OT operations.

However, supporting applications and computing infrastructure at the edge is more complex than in a datacenter environment.

Together, Spectro Cloud and Stratus offer a comprehensive Edge Computing solution, delivering:

Customers must not only maintain legacy applications and conventional VM workloads but also introduce cloud-native containerized applications. The traditional approach of adding new appliances for each new application poses several challenges. More devices lead to more failure points, increased security concerns, and additional steps for integration with existing applications.

Deploying applications to the edge involves managing the lifecycle of edge hardware and software stacks across hundreds or thousands of locations. Tasks such as patching and upgrading are time-consuming and costly, whether done remotely or through field engineering visits. These challenges make the deployment of new, valuable applications unfeasible and cost-prohibitive.

© 2024 Spectro Cloud and Stratus. All rights reserved.

• High Availability and Fault Tolerance: Downtime prevention for both VM and container workloads on a Class I Division 2 (CID2) certified platform.

• Effortless Remote Lifecycle Management: Seamless scalability across multiple locations.

• Enhanced Resiliency and Security: Robust protection for both new and legacy applications, tailored for OT project lifecycles.

The integration of the Stratus ztC Edge platform with the Spectro Cloud Palette management solution is further supported

by Stratus’ ztC Services, which include system support, consulting, and managed services.

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Stratus ztC Edge

Spectro Cloud Palette Edge

Stratus ztC Edge is a secure, reliable, highly automated computing platform that enables OT and IT teams to run critical applications close to equipment and processes where data is generated, whether in an industrial edge location, a retail branch or commercial building.

Spectro Cloud Palette Edge is a complete centralized management platform for Edge Computing deployments.

The platform’s unique combination of builtin virtualization and out-of-the-box high availability and fault tolerance in a CID2 certified, IP40-rated enclosure makes it ideal to simplify edge infrastructure and run mission-critical software without downtime or data loss in operations environments.

Stratus Redundant Linux, Stratus’ Ubuntu Linux-based OS for ztC Edge, typically supports up to four VMs running concurrently on the ztC Edge platform.

From its intuitive interface, IT teams can model, deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters at the edge to orchestrate containerized application workloads, choosing from a range of edge-optimized operating systems, Kubernetes distributions and cloud-native integrations (e.g. observability, service mesh).

With Palette’s rich lifecycle operations capabilities, teams can scale to manage hundreds or thousands of edge devices, in parallel. Its unique decentralized architecture ensures autonomous operations even in intermittent connectivity environments.

Palette is designed for resiliency and security, and is available in a highly secure edition called Palette VerteX, with FIPS 140-2 cryptography across the stack.

How it works We install the local Palette agent into one of the virtual machines running on each Stratus ztC Edge host.

© 2024 Spectro Cloud and Stratus. All rights reserved.

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A local K8s cluster on each edge device

Manage your Stratus deployments at scale

Using that local agent, Palette builds a Kubernetes cluster inside that virtual machine, enabling you to deploy and orchestrate containerized applications to the edge, alongside the traditional VM workloads that ztC Edge already supports.

The Palette agent also enables remote administration of the Stratus ztC Edge device it runs on, interfacing with the underlying Stratus Redundant Linux operating system via API. This unlocks greater management control for both the host OS and VM workloads at scale, without need for on-site engineer visits or device-by-device remote admin access.

Full isolation is maintained between the VMs to meet the security and operational needs of mission-critical workloads.

The Palette agent operates autonomously to continuously enforce policy and maintain the health of the Kubernetes cluster locally.

All of the advantages of the ztC Edge architecture, including Stratus’ high availability technologies, continue to apply.

For lifecycle management, the Palette agent communicates back to the central Palette management plane, where operators can monitor the health of all their deployed edge devices and perform activities such as patching, backups and configuration changes. Palette executes these actions in parallel across all the edge devices.

© 2024 Spectro Cloud and Stratus. All rights reserved.

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Benefits of the solution • Reduced cost, particularly in field engineering costs due to parallel remote management.

• Flexibility to modernize edge applications and converge IT with OT at your own pace, with support for both VM and container workloads on a single device.

• Security and resiliency, with Stratus’s ruggedized hardware, high availability architecture and hard isolation between virtual machine environments.

• Operational agility, with effortless remote management of your entire edge estate from a single pane of glass.

About Spectro Cloud

About Stratus

Spectro Cloud uniquely enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes in production, at scale. Its Palette enterprise Kubernetes management platform gives platform engineering and DevOps teams effortless control of the full Kubernetes lifecycle. With support for both VM and container workloads, Palette is a truly unified management platform across clouds, data centers, bare metal and edge environments.

For leaders digitally transforming their operations in order to drive predictable, peak performance with minimal risk, Stratus ensures the continuous availability of business-critical applications by delivering zero-touch Edge Computing platforms that are simple to deploy and maintain, protected from interruptions and threats, and autonomous.

Spectro Cloud is a Gartner Cool Vendor, CRN Tech Innovator, and a ‘leader’ and ‘outperformer’ in GigaOm’s Radars for Edge Kubernetes and Managed Kubernetes.

For over 40 years, we have provided reliable and redundant zero-touch computing, enabling global Fortune 500 companies and small-to-medium sized businesses to securely and remotely turn data into actionable intelligence at the Edge, cloud and data center – driving uptime and efficiency.

For more information, visit spectrocloud.com or follow @spectrocloudinc and @spectrocloudgov on X.

For more information, visit www.stratus.com or follow @stratus-technologies on LinkedIn and @StratusAlwaysOn on X.

© 2024 Spectro Cloud and Stratus. All rights reserved. Spectro Cloud, Palette, and the respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Spectro Cloud in the US and other countries. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective © 2024 The Spectro and Stratus.

Allnot rights reserved. owners. use ofCloud the word partner does imply a partnership relationship between Spectro Cloud and any other company.

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