Spectro Cloud and Stratus ztC Edge™:
Simple, secure and resilient Edge Computing for VM and container workloads
The challenge
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.
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.
The solution
Together, Spectro Cloud and Stratus offer a comprehensive Edge Computing solution, delivering:
• 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.
Stratus ztC 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.
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.
Spectro Cloud Palette Edge
Spectro Cloud Palette Edge is a complete centralized management platform for Edge Computing deployments.
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.
A local K8s cluster on each edge device
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.
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.
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.
