The News: Red Hat and Intel jointly announced a new industrial edge platform that is designed to offer a modern approach to building and operating industrial controls, incorporating standard IT technologies and new insights provided via AI. The new platform is designed to allow industrial control system (ICS) vendors, systems integrators (SIs) and manufacturers to automate previously manual industrial tasks, thereby speeding operations and allowing greater scalability.
You can reach a Press Release with the details of the announcements on the Red Hat website.
Red Hat Collaborates With Intel To Deliver Industrial Edge Platform
Analyst Take: Red Hat and Intel are joining forces to offer a new industrial edge platform designed to incorporate both standard IT technologies and new insight capabilities provided via AI, with an eye on helping ICS vendors, SIs, and manufacturers to automate manual industrial tasks. The jointly developed industrial edge platform is intended to provide a solution that spans real-time shop floor control and AI/machine learning (AI/ML) to full IT manageability, providing customers with more efficiency and greater choice in their industrial and IT system architectures.
Red Hat and Intel are working to integrate Intel-based platforms and Intel Edge Controls for Industrial (Intel ECI) with current and future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, starting with collaboration in upstream Linux communities such as the Fedora Project and CentOS Stream. This collaboration extends to bringing these controls and platforms to Red Hat Device Edge (early access), Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and Red Hat OpenShift.
New Features Drive Better Visibility, Scalability, and Control of Manufacturing Operations
Over the past decade, the use of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has allowed manufacturing and industrial customers to capture and utilize more granular data about the end processes and products used and created in these environments, as well as gather performance data about the machines. The challenge for many organizations has thus shifted to applying more efficient, effective, and flexible control architectures to the factory or industrial setting and integrating them with modern technologies such as AI and ML and their existing enterprise IT system architectures.
According to the release announcing the collaboration, organizations will be able to benefit from many new capabilities and features, including:
- A real-time kernel that provides lower latency and reduced jitter, helping applications run repeatedly with greater reliability
- Fully integrated real-time capabilities to support industrial automation for predictable performance
- Advanced management and network automation for system deployment and management with lower resource usage, simplifying the industrial network creation and management using open standards-based tools
- Scalability and flexibility through a software-defined platform approach that facilitates more portable, scalable control and maximizes adaptability
- Uninterrupted operations supported by high-availability and redundancy attributes built-in to the platform
- Simplified AI workload integration with the ability to take an AI workload and run it next to a control workload, helping simplify hardware complexity
- An architecture that enables AI to more easily improve product quality, system uptime, and maintenance
- Automated security patching and updates
- An immutable operating system plane and a platform built on hardened, production-tested components
Leveraging Open Standards and Community-Driven Innovation to Ensure Better Integration
Red Hat says that this new industrial edge platform will be built on open standards and was built based on input from community-based feedback from thousands of developers globally. This approach is designed to ensure a more simplified integration with other hardware and software components that are utilized across the factory floor and across the IT stack.
Red Hat also says that the core code transparency and the company’s visible roadmap and release cycle will aid in enterprise planning. This transparency is particularly important to large organizations that are charged with overseeing many machines or production networks and need to stagger updates to ensure production or process schedules will not be affected.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
