The importance of highly available industry edge solutions

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Depending on requirements, edge computing solutions might be used to oversee production, ensure safety, enable low-latency data collection, or even manage advanced Smart factories. What are the top considerations that businesses deploying edge computing solutions should watch for?

We outline some of them here:

Highly available: Often deployed to oversee mission-critical systems, edge deployments must stay up. This places the onus on failure prevention rather than failure recovery, which calls for robust hardware paired with a resilient software stack to keep systems running.

Security and privacy: The ever-present threat of cyberattacks means that physical security cannot be ignored. Measures can range from physical locks to the requisite monitoring systems to support post-incident security audits.

Standard systems: Standardisation can bring operating costs down significantly and serve to ensure the availability of components.

Remote operation: The hard-to-access locations of these edge systems call for the ability to manage them remotely. And with multiple edge deployments becoming the norm rather than the exception, remote capabilities also translate into an ability to scale deployments with the same manpower base.

A partnership to deliver proven solutions

To deliver a robust edge environment, Schneider Electric partnered with Stratus Technologies which has a complete, comprehensive, and proven range of edge solutions. The hyperconverged systems Stratus offer enable compute, storage, and networking to be incorporated into a single, integrated platform for deployment at the edge.

Schneider Electric has a long history of providing resilient power protection solutions such as uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to keep edge systems running. This ranges from UPSs that are designed for every kind of usage scenario and environment, to micro data centre enclosures designed to house – and secure – the required edge systems and power protection infrastructure.

In addition, Schneider and Stratus worked closely with industrial operations software vendor, AVEVA to detail the optimal configuration for the operation of the software on Stratus platforms and Schneider enclosures. This allows organisations to quickly deploy a complete edge solution, confident that it will operate well.

To learn more about the unique requirements of an industrial edge deployment, check out this white paper titled “Industry 4.0: Minimising Downtime Risk with Resilient Edge Computing” here.