Business white paper

HPE Edgeline Converged Edge SystemsConverging OT and IT in one ruggedized system

Business white paper

Table of contents

3 Executive summary

3 New disruption on the horizon

4 Taking advantage of new data flows

4 Understanding OT

5 Solution in action—a case study

6 Looking ahead

7 Consider the past to chart the future

7 The HPE perspective

9 Delivering first-of-a-kind edge computing systems

10 What customers are saying

11 Conclusion

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Executive summary

Operational technology (OT) includes data acquisition systems, control systems, and industrial networks found at the “edge” of many industrial and manufacturing organizations. These sophisticated OT devices capture, analyze, and take action in real time. Countless companies have used these OT devices for years; and today, converging OT capabilities with enterprise-class IT systems in single box and deploying them at industrial and manufacturing edges offers numerous advantages. OT and IT convergence delivers significant business benefits including space savings, energy savings, higher performance, and lower operating costs.

HPE has invented a new product category—HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems—based on the promise of converging OT systems with enterprise IT at the edge.

This white paper explores HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems in depth, and examines the technology behind OT and IT convergence, explains how it works, and reveals the benefits customers can gain.

New disruption on the horizon

The wave of edge computing—characterized by data flowing from an explosive number of connected devices at the edge—is the next disruption that will enable businesses to better serve customers, governments to meet the needs of their citizens, and individuals to enrich and enhance their lives. By processing massive amounts of Big Data at the edge, organizations benefit from:

• Productivity gains with new levels of efficiency

• Enhanced employee safety and client engagement

• New products and services previously unavailable

Today’s organizations face a one-sided choice: either modernize and adopt edge computing, or be rendered irrelevant. A prime example of this “choice” is Toys “R” Us. The iconic toy company was saddled with billions of dollars of debt, which stopped it from making the necessary investment in modernizing its stores—namely, moving to edge computing.1 The bottom line—the lack of digitization created an underwhelming shopping experience, compared to other stores that embraced digitization and lured away the Toys “R” Us customer base.

1 money.cnn.com/2018/03/15/news/companies/toys-r-us-closing-blame/index.html

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Taking advantage of new data flows

In many organizations, IT is a walled island within the data center. This firewalled territory stores massive volumes of data and accumulated knowledge including:

• Transaction flows

• Long-term plans

• Employee relations

• Resource allocation

• And so much more

Adding to these volumes are (1) the new Big Data, which is gathered from sensors measuring the “things” at the edge; and (2) “big analog data,” which is the oldest, fastest, biggest data of all—posing a monumental challenge in terms of management and analysis.

Advances in Big Data analytics and new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) can now be applied to all these troves of data—helping to boost performance, service, and reliability, as well as provide new insights. When used in concert, these new technologies enable businesses to respond more quickly and intelligently to the ever-changing marketplace and hidden disruptions within their operations.

In cases where workloads run in the cloud, companies utilize this inherently scalable environment to deliver better products and services. For example, LinkedIn can instantly query a user’s interests and connections, and then suggest connections that could lead to new business opportunities. LinkedIn taps the massive compute performance available in the cloud, coupled with voluminous data sets, to deliver insights humans could not derive on their own.

Understanding OT

OT is used at any location where goods are created, transported, refactored, and ultimately delivered to consumers. Examples of OT include direct sensor data acquisition, SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) networks, and programmable logic controllers.

OT systems are used to improve efficiency, safety, agility, and most of all throughput. These automated systems help improve business performance, and they are critically important to enhancing customer satisfaction. Every product/service improvement enabled by OT directly impacts the company’s bottom line or the satisfaction of its customers, employees, and/or partners.

Operational technology is used at the edge (anywhere outside the data center), where internet connections are often intermittent or unreliable, and the conditions are typically harsh. Consider the following edge locations that heavily leverage OT:

• Factory conveyor systems and manufacturing machinery

• Real-time communication systems in a military operation

• Traffic signals on roadsides

• Safety systems on factory floors and chemical refineries

• Generators in power stations

• Drilling and extraction rigs for oil and gas

Let’s consider the OT-IT convergence in action.

Understanding OT terminologyPXI—PXI is an abbreviation for PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation. PXI is based on the PCI architecture, which is a commonly used standard in personal computers, and uses the industrial CompactPCI (cPCI) connector. A PXI instrument inserted in a system appears to the operating system as a device, just like a PCI card in a personal computer.2

PXIe—PXI Express (PXIe) boards expand data storage to meet performance and capacity requirements.

SCADA—Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is a system of software and hardware elements that allows industrial organizations to:

• Control industrial processes locally or at remote locations

• Monitor, gather, and process real-time data

• Directly interact with devices such as sensors, valves, pumps, motors, and more through human-machine interface (HMI) software

• Record events into a log file

SCADA systems are crucial for industrial organizations since they help to maintain efficiency, process data for smarter decisions, and communicate system issues to help mitigate downtime.3

2 applicos.com/rsrc/pdf/Applicos-What_is_PXI.pdf

3 inductiveautomation.com/what-is-scada

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Solution in action—a case study

HPE Edgeline Converged Edge System for automotive manufacturing in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)HPE solution: EL1000 with converged OT (control systems, data acquisition systems, industrial networks) and IT (enterprise-grade compute, scalable storage, remote systems management).

Primary business outcomes: Increased production, with additional finished automobiles rolling off the manufacturing line each day.

Use case: HPE Edgeline EL1000 systems execute quality assurance (QA) tests and validate hundreds of subsystems, which are assembled into automobiles in production. Sensors are attached to electromechanical subsystems such as seats, braking systems, electric windows, door locks, and windshield wipers. Sensors are connected to the control systems (OT) embedded inside the HPE Edgeline EL1000 via the automotive industrial control area network (CAN); the control systems actuate the operation of the subsystems. Measurements are then taken via the data acquisition systems (OT) embedded in the EL1000 to validate proper operation of the product under test. The measurement data is sent to the compute systems (IT) embedded in the EL1000, where it provides insight into the quality and operation of the unit under test and enforces pass/fail criteria—removing human error from the process and thereby increasing total production output.

Furthermore, the EL1000 is connected to the enterprise network and the central data center, where it can be accessed remotely via the embedded remote systems management, HPE Integrated Lights Out (iLO). If problems are detected on the manufacturing floor, remote access is immediately available to production engineers to gain real-time insight and efficient debugging without physical presence.

This converged OT-IT solution replaced what was previously housed in three separate systems:

• CAN bus data acquisition appliance

• Ethernet switch

• Workstation with a human machine interface (HMI)

• Server with a virtual machine (VM) to translate and stream factory floor quality data to the cloud

Utilizing high-performance CPUs and virtualization technologies, the HPE Edgeline EL1000 provided the path for converging and consolidating four separate platforms into a single system. In addition, the remote manageability and security of the HPE iLO platform paved the way for enhanced deployment and maintenance throughout the factory floor.

From the OT sensors and networks to the cloud connectors and true remote access, the solution elements work in concert to create a highly efficient distributed “edge-to-cloud” solution.

HPE Edgeline EL1000 Converged Edge System

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Business value of HPE Edgeline converged OT-IT: Overall, the power and flexibility of IT is converged with OT on the manufacturing floor edge. In addition to increased production and security, OT-IT convergence enables this manufacturing company to reduce operating expense (OPEX), space, and energy.

• A consistent and standard platform, based on open x86 and operational technology across the manufacturing line, supports the reuse of technical skills, helping to reduce OPEX and labor costs. Technicians have only one system to learn and manage. IT administrators use the same automation practices as the data center to provision security and software updates.

• Security is enhanced, with each converged system having fewer vulnerable components. In addition, IT-grade security protects the manufacturing line and its network.

• Serviceability is enhanced, as the modular design of the OT systems and cable-free compute blades supports fast field replaceable units while minimizing human error.

• Manufacturing floor reliability and uptime are improved. Converged integrated solutions include fewer independent systems and cables, and that translates to fewer points of failure and enhanced remote debugging when errors are encountered.

• Energy savings increase with less equipment to power, fewer cable drops and energy conversions, leading to less energy lost to transmission.

• Less space is required by the integrated design, so it more easily fits on the manufacturing floor edge, freeing space for better productivity or efficiency.

• Less staff is needed. As the company’s production scales to include several hundred thousand cars per year, operating staff will scale at a much lower rate to administer these scalable, resilient, automated systems.

Looking ahead

Considering potential solutions for evolving business challengesAs organizations consider how IT can help them resolve their business challenges today and tomorrow, three potential solutions come immediately to mind.

1. Move everything to the cloud. While this appears to be a scalable option that is easy to set up, there are some significant drawbacks: intermittent connectivity and high latency, high bandwidth cost, meeting ever-changing data compliance rules/regulations, ensuring data resiliency and bandwidth availability, and, of course, security.

2. Create industry-specific, use-case-specific appliance solutions. This option is an excellent choice for certain uses cases, but deploying a different appliance for every use case would create problems in terms of data center space, energy consumption, complexity, purchase cost, deployment time, and vendor lock-in.

3. Leave IT systems the way they are. The “status quo” approach might look like the safest option, but it actually opens the door for your competition to consume your customer base. While you’re busy doing more of the same, your competition will be using modern IT solutions combined with OT systems and data to deliver new products/services, boost the quality of their offerings, enhance customer experiences, and engage more effectively with employees.

If none of these potential solutions is actually viable, what other choice is available?

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Consider the past to chart the future

Yesterday—data center disruption; today—digital automationUntil the early 2000s, data centers around the world primarily ran on IBM mainframes and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX systems. These systems were built on closed, proprietary technologies (hardware, applications, operating systems, and application ecosystems) that reinforced vendor lock-in and suppressed innovation.

When Compaq launched the x86-based ProLiant line of servers in 1993, open, standards-based (and eventually virtualized) solutions radically changed the playing field within a decade. These technology advancements enabled the emergence of software-defined IT. They also opened the door for a wide range of new and highly innovative companies to enter the marketplace on that new open ecosystem.

Today, the data center and the benefactor cloud landscape are characterized by rapid, automated application deployments; continuous improvement/continuous development (CI/CD) at scale; and underpinned by silicon-based security. In addition, modern data center systems are designed to deploy analytics in an instant at any scale.

As we consider the far-reaching benefits of data center disruption—enhanced performance, productivity, efficiency, reliability, extensibility, and many more—the next logical step is to disrupt closed operational systems/technology ecosystems. Through foundational disruption and utilization of best practices, the same operational efficiencies now found in data center processes can also be applied at the edge.

The HPE perspective

Taking perspectives from the past, significant opportunity exists to elevate the OT industry with open, industry-standard, converged solutions. To help customers avoid the limitations of closed systems and the drawbacks of a cloud-only approach—bandwidth, vendor lock-in, inconsistent security, and lack of control—HPE’s approach is to converge OT and IT systems at the edge within the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems. Rather than take up unnecessarily large amounts of space, use excessive energy, and create management complexity, converged OT-IT systems from HPE:

• Reduce space consumed

• Demand less energy to run

• Eliminate unnecessary cables

• Streamline administration and security

• Reduce acquisition and OPEX costs

• Boost performance and app consolidation

• Create the opportunity for first-of-a-kind converged applications

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Rooted in the industry standards that allowed the data center to flourish—virtualization, automation, security, CI/CD—HPE converged OT-IT systems deliver DevOps-ready systems explicitly designed for edge deployments. HPE’s converged OT-IT systems are designed to solve the seven universal challenges of edge computing.

1. The edge presents a “big analog data” problem, where the data sources are nature, people, devices, buildings, machines, the environment, and more. Sensors acquire all of this edge data, and it represents significantly more data than found in today’s Big Data environments. There is too much data to be sent to the cloud, but analyzing it at the edge can lead to the next business innovation.

2. The edge offers “perpetual connectivity,” where edge systems remain constantly connected with their customers, sending data back to the central data center and cloud. Perpetual connectivity enables customers to monitor the condition and usage of devices and data to better understand user behavior—as well as maintain control of things and devices and push fixes, upgrades, patches, and management to users.

3. Data at the edge can be “really real time,” knowing that “real time” actually starts with a sensor on a thing at the edge. Then the data travels through a translation node to an edge IT system for pre-processing, and ultimately passes to the central data center/cloud. “Really real time” means seamlessly completing analytics at the edge, enabling businesses to make the best possible decisions.

4. At the edge, data insights are gained within a “spectrum of value,” which includes five distinct stages: real time, early life, in motion, at rest, and archived. Three types of insight can be gained from IoT data at any of these stages, and all of these insights work together to drive better business outcomes. For example, a business insight could be, “Where is my inventory?” An engineering insight might be, “When does a robotic arm in my manufacturing facility need maintenance?” And a possible scientific insight could be, “Is that a new sub-atomic particle?”

5. The edge presents a “time-to-insight” versus a “depth-of-insight” tradeoff, where you can either get immediate answers that are not deep, or deep answers that are not fast. Up until now, speed and depth have been mutually exclusive. The winning system is one that provides deep answers fast.

6. The next “V” of Big Data is “visibility,” where the traditional Vs of Big Data are variety, volume, velocity, and value. “Visibility” of Big Data means accessing, gaining insight, and then acting on Big Data from the remote IoT edge for better outcomes.

7. The edge will become “intelligent,” where data center–class compute and analytics will shift left—a core focus of HPE and its partners. “Shifting left,” out of the data center to the edge, and converging IT with OT systems already at the edge will include high-performance data center–class cores that perform deep computing, enterprise-class manageability, virtualization of functions, and scalable storage. In fact, everything found in today’s comfortable, air-conditioned data centers will move to the hostile edge where it must be temperature-, shock-, dust-, and vibration-hardened. Evolved IT components will move to what is now considered the OT domain.

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Delivering first-of-a-kind edge computing systems

Launched in 2017, HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems deliver the benefits of converged OT-IT to a wide range of industries that operate at the edge:

• Manufacturing

• IIoT

• Telecommunications and media

• Retail (stores and branch offices)

• Military and defense

• Transportation and automotive

HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems uniquely combine the best practices of the data center with advanced technologies for operations at the edge.

• Enterprise-grade analytics engines to rapidly gain insight from data and provide control for today’s tough problems; advanced accelerators (GPUs, encoders, etc.) to process advanced video formats; hardened virtualization to enable high availability and fast deployment and redeployment; high-speed, high-capacity storage for the most demanding sensors; and high-speed wired and wireless networks to enable placement anywhere.

• Enterprise-grade security and systems management that interoperate with existing security standards, automate any administrative task, maintain software updates, and have insight into their health without compromising the mission-critical analytics and controls application.

• Uniquely converged data acquisition and control. The first release of HPE Edgeline systems includes the standards-based PXIe synchronous data acquisition system. HPE partnered with National Instruments to qualify the existing line of PXI data acquisition and control adapters—enabling Edgeline systems to integrate data center-grade analytics and security (IT) with any industrial data acquisition and control system (OT). With National Instrument’s LabVIEW software, data flows can be easily created and combined with real-time analytical functions and incoming IT-based data feeds to provide deterministic control of supervised assets.

With HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems, customers gain uncompromised and identical enterprise-class compute, storage, and management at the edge. The benefits of enterprise compute at the edge include improved system reliability, enhanced overall security at the edge, and a significantly reduced learning curve by using IT-based administration standards. At the same time, HPE Edgeline delivers enterprise IT capabilities in a ruggedized system designed for the harsh operating environments found at the edge—withstanding temperatures from 0 to 55° Celsius with high shock and vibration standards. In addition, a military-grade certification for HPE Edgeline allows Edgeline to operate in the most extreme mission-critical environments.

HPE Edgeline systems deliver enterprise-class IT through:

• Powerful compute using industry-standard Intel® Xeon® processors

• Robust software-defined storage, up to 48 TB

• High-performance Ethernet connectivity, up to 40 Gb/s per system

• Essential HPE iLO systems management

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By keeping data at the edge, rather than sending it back and forth between the edge and the data center/cloud, HPE Edgeline systems:

• Quicken response times

• Lower bandwidth utilization

• Cut cloud and connectivity costs

• Improve security

• Reduce IT skill and storage duplication

• Improve solution reliability

• Enhance data policy and geo-fencing compliance

What customers are saying

HIROTEC HIROTEC selected HPE Edgeline systems to support edge analytics. The ruggedized HPE Edgeline systems’ small footprint minimized the need for HIROTEC to sacrifice valuable factory floor space. In addition, the systems require no specialized cooling to operate.

Case study: “From smart manufacturing, to smart factory—to smart enterprise”

Texmark“Together with HPE, we’re building a refinery of the future that combs through data and reveals how the entire plant is interconnected. It becomes like a living, breathing, organic plant that knows how it should operate; if any part falls out of line, it flags for intervention.”

– Linda Salinas, Plant Manager, Texmark Chemicals

Case study: “Texmark Chemicals deploys IIoT at the edge in showcase Refinery of the Future”

Murphy Oil“HPE Edgeline is a data center the size of a shoebox, providing rugged compute power never done before at the edge.”

– Mike Orr, Murphy Oil

Video: Enabling Discovery in Oil & Gas with Edge to Cloud Technologies

CenterPoint Energy“We are enthused about the value of HPE Edgeline edge-to-cloud solutions, as we strive to significantly expand our analytics capabilities at the edge to reach our goal of creating smarter and more efficient energy delivery for our customers.”

– Dr. Steve Pratt, CTO, CenterPoint Energy

Seagate Technology “With the combination of OT and IT, HPE Converged Edge Systems provide the ability to have centralized control of OT resources in our factories, as though they were IT data center resources.”

– Bruce King, Senior Principal Data Scientist, Seagate Technology

Video: Seagate optimizes manufacturing using HPE’s Converged Edge Systems and AI analytics

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Conclusion

Capitalizing on the best practices learned from data center disruption, HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems are designed to take edge computing to new levels of performance, efficiency, security, and reliability. Today, customers in the manufacturing, telecommunications, automotive, and energy industries use HPE Edgeline systems to:

• Reduce network traffic and prioritize data sent to the cloud. The systems are designed to analyze and process data at the edge, instead of sending it back and forth to a central data center or to the cloud.

• Accelerate time to action and control. Edgeline systems enable customers to collect, manage, and analyze data at the edge, directly from OT assets, to quickly gain insight and react to changes and opportunities.

• Boost cost efficiency. Putting compute power closer to things at the edge reduces network infrastructure and management costs, as well as removes unnecessary spending for storage capacity in data center or cloud environments, because it sends only useful data.

As we look to the future, we can expect great things from edge applications that are yet to be developed. For example, edge computing will speed up content delivery for telecommunications providers. Manufacturing organizations can use edge computing to monitor plant conditions, as well as leverage predictive analytics and AI to remediate problems before they impact production. Oil and gas companies can quickly identify mechanical and maintenance issues with drills and pumps, avoiding drilling downtime. Innovations like these and many more are being developed by HPE and our partners and customers at the HPE Global IoT Innovation Labs—found in strategic locations around the world.

Together with our future-focused partners, HPE is leading the way by converging OT and IT, and disrupting the edge.

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© Copyright 2018 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Intel Xeon is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other third-party marks are property of their respective owners.

a00059235ENW, November 2018

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