Fast, Simple and Secure Orchestration of Operational Technologies at the Edge with HPE Edgeline

The edge can be categorized as anywhere that’s not the data center or cloud, and consequently encompasses a variety of environments - a manufacturing floor, oil rig, truck or a power plant.  It is one of the biggest sources of “big data”, since much of this data is simply parameters measured from the physical world e.g. pressure, temperature, light, vibration etc. Customers desperately need an efficient method to acquire, store, analyze and act on this data in order to be successful. To this end, they are looking to deploy IT technologies into the OT environment such as a manufacturing floor or oil rig, and physically converge the two domains and go further than simply an organization or process change. In this post we will look at how HPE is leveraging our strengths in enterprise IT hardware and software into the OT space, and making it fast, simple and secure for customers to achieve this goal.

The challenge with automation:

Setting up converged OT is confusing and suboptimal

Take a scenario where the customer wishes to deploy an IT system on a manufacturing floor to collect data from sensors on equipment, analyze it to get insights, and immediately take control action to improve the outcome. First, they need to identify the appropriate edge platform that can talk to the OT devices already in the environment, but yet has sufficient horsepower and capabilities to manage huge volumes of data and run demanding analytics.

This system must then be physically installed into the factory floor, have firmware updated to the latest versions, the Operating System (OS) installed from bare metal, and applications loaded on top of it. When a high-performance enterprise class system is setup, this activity may necessitate expensive IT specialists to be deployed onsite to manage each and every deployment. Furthermore, basic systems like gateways or Industrial PCs, will force a manual installation of firmware and software on each system, leading to long setup times and possibly inconsistent end states.

Once the system installation is done, the customer needs to figure out how to “talk” the right industrial protocols to interact with the equipment they’d like to monitor. For example, they will need to find the correct driver for the OT I/O hardware (e.g. CANbus, MOBDUS or TSN) integrated in their edge system and spend significant time to ensure that it can be consistently installed, performs to expectations and is secure. Then the user needs to find drivers for the endpoint devices inside the monitored equipment such as a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) or Distributed Control System (DCS), understand how to extract data from its registers, and map these to data tags that an application can use. The collected data tags need to be routed via a workflow to the appropriate analytics application, and once insight is obtained, the entire flow must be reversed to control the equipment. Much of this requires custom coding today and results in a solution which has not been stress-tested, hardened or secured to enterprise IT levels. The ability to scale this blueprint easily to other lines, sites or companies is also doubtful.

Finally, once the solution is deployed it must be managed and maintained, and this is not a typical skillset found within the OT engineers and technicians working on the manufacturing floor. But it is also frequently not cost effective to station IT specialists at each site to handle issues as they emerge, putting customers in a conundrum.

The solution: HPE delivers the system, software and services to make converged OT easy

HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems is a new class of high-performance, high-density, Converged OT systems that are ruggedized to be deployed in harsh edge environments. In addition to bringing full datacenter-grade enterprise IT compute, storage, networking, and systems management capabilities to the edge, Edgeline can also directly interoperate with operational technologies (OT) (i.e. “Convergence of IT and OT”) typically found at the edge e.g. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) or SCADA systems. This physical integration of data acquisition, control systems, and industrial networking into an Enterprise IT platform, enables the Edgeline to “talk” with industrial equipment on the oil rig or manufacturing floor over MODBUS or PROFINET, as easily as it can send Augmented Reality (AR) overlays to a tablet over WiFi.

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