Digital Manufacturing With Red Hat Edge Solutions.

Worldwide, Industry 4.0 is fuelling the emergence of converting traditional factories to smart factories across diverse industry verticals, related to manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, healthcare, defence, FMCG etc. The adoption of connected and intelligent digital technologies like IoT and Edge computing further enables smart factories to enhance productivity, profitability, compliance, and customer delight.

It’s becoming clearer that convergence of IoT, Edge and hybrid-cloud are imminent and transformation initiatives for application running at plants need fast scale approaches to ripe the benefits of being ahead for competitive advantages. However to transform at scale couple of pointers like consistency, latency, security and cost of acquisition may occur and therefore inclination on selecting open and scaleable platforms of Red Hat is increasing. ?

Edge computing and cloud?computing have a natural and evolving relationship with each other?as the edge can be treated as an extension of cloud, and especially Open Hybrid Cloud infrastructure. The relationship is bi-directional as use cases and data sets running at hybrid cloud can move out to the edge when and where needed, and the edge can flow back to your core platform when that makes sense.

Industries need flexibility in terms of where they want to run their workloads like critical plant areas, shop-floors or may be in moveable segments to collect data and chunk it, however they need consistency of operations so that they can maintain it efficiently and if any changes needed they can react quickly.

Red Hat Open Edge and Open Hybrid Cloud for Digital Manufacturing

In industrial context, IoT comprises of thousand or even millions of sensors and devices are running at various locations doing and capturing very specific things, but as you plan to gather those data at edge locations and move the chunked information towards you datacenter running as hybrid cloud becomes more generic.

As we move towards edge, more and more diversified use cases arises based on several machines, data types and priority of actions for which it become more important to select open edge solution so that customers can execute cloud native build and open integration for getting effective and reasonable insights for faster decisions.

To solve this unification and consistency challenge for different type of application deployments including custom builds, analytics or AI driven or ISV software, Red Hat brings unified and open platform at edge comprising of same build as like in open hybrid cloud so that customer can use same pattern of hybrid cloud like build once – deploy many, scale with ease of operations and maintenance.

Red Hat Open Edge With Open Hybrid Cloud Benefit

Use case fitment like right workload at homogeneous environment is one advantage of the open edge and can be deployed and operationalise as extended section of open hybrid cloud. Use cases like compute intensive workloads may better served from hybrid cloud whereas those specialised sensor based latency driven use cases at plant level are likely best supported by edge.

The edge considerations cannot be seen as point and isolated solution as managing it at scale becomes complex. Therefore cloud-edge hybrid connection is necessary for operational efficiency, especially in industries where the use cases are adopted fast with scaling edge footprint.

Cost And Security Benefits

As more and more workloads related to machines and operations becomes nearer to the location for processing via edge solution, cost of network for sending large sets of data and cost of compute for processing reduces at datacenter.

Also executing faster operations and rectification for latency driven plant workloads at edge reduces downtime, increases availability and thereby reduces overall cost of production.

Since most of processing is happening at plant level, industrial data related to various productions and operations are less exposed to internet and therefore it helps to build better security posture, helps to protect both hybrid cloud and edge assets.

Security deployed at the edge also benefits from visibility of all requests and responses from various applications and infrastructure it protects. Both IT and OT team can take corrective measures quickly in case they find malicious IPs, behaviour and actions either the section of edge solution or the section of hybrid cloud.?

Architectural Considerations for Open Edge Solution

First, to build scalable Edge architecture, customers need to consider open architecture which not only helps to integrate better but also provides flexibility to develop and run application with speed and agility at edge.

Second, what should run where decision needs granular approach for which micro-services and container based architecture are best fit.

Third, unified and cloud like deployment so that same benefits of hybrid cloud can passed on to edge driven applications.

Fourth, automation and manageability at scale so that operational efficiency at all level IT and OT can be deployed starting from level 0 to level 4 infrastructure and applications.

Fifth, build once deploy many with fast change capabilities can help to bring new use cases faster and thereby more and more digital path can be adopted at plant level for better ROI of edge solutions.

Red Hat’s Approach and Solutions

The Red Hat Edge portfolio helps industries to standardise on hybrid cloud and implement edge computing with cloud-native technologies, transforming critical operations and allowing them to be more responsive and efficient.

Combined with the rest of Red Hat’s comprehensive portfolio of products, services and ecosystem of certified partner solutions, Red Hat Edge provides an open, interoperable and scalable platform that is flexible enough to meet organisations where they are now and wherever they want to go.?

Red Hat works hand in hand with industries to fully understand their unique ?IT and OT challenges and uses open source validated patterns to build transformation approach, build solution that supports immediate and future needs while accelerating edge computing strategy.

Red Hat has world class technologies and products starting from –

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as core platform can be used both as Linux Based cloud OS and Device edge

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) can be used both for cloud native workloads deployed and managed uniformly at hybrid or multi-cloud environment or at far edge, provider edge or even end user premises edge

Red Hat Ansible automation platform for automating workloads across IT and OT

Red Hat Application Services for faster application development, integration with enterprise service bus and API’s, Decision Manager and Process Automation.

Technologies can be wrapped with world class Red Hat Learning Services for quick knowledge gain and Red Hat Consulting Services for creating innovation path and deployment.

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