Industrial servers: Easy to deploy, manage, support with hot-swapping components

Run business-critical workloads in a control room, local data center or edge environment using continuously available industrial servers, according to a company with a Control Engineering Engineers’ Choice Award product.

By DoShik Wood February 27, 2022
Courtesy: Stratus

 

Learning Objectives

  • Understand that continuously available industrial servers can send home alerts and have hot-swappable components.
  • Learn how industrial servers achieve continuous availability with dual-data processing subsystems.
  • Explore how industrial servers help edge computing resolve bandwidth, latency, security issues.

An industrial server platform should be a fully integrated, continuously available hardware and software solution that enables companies to run business-critical workloads in the control room, local data center or edge environment. These solutions should offer better than five-nines availability [99.999%], eliminate unplanned downtime and data loss, and ensure all transactions are processed and applications run continuously. Industrial server computing platforms allow organizations to build distributed, edge-in architectures required to run advanced software applications, manage large scale input/output (I/O) counts, and collect real-time data.

Industrial server: Home alerts, hot-swapping components

An industrial server should be easy to deploy, manage and support, with call home alerts and hot swappable components that may be serviced while in operation to eliminate planned or unplanned downtime, or data loss. Industrial servers should offer a variety of configurations for value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators, solution builders, and end-users to fine-tune edge computing power and performance, for current as well as future software deployments.

Teams in oil and gas, manufacturing, smart infrastructure, water and wastewater, and other industries should be able to use industrial servers to accelerate edge automation and deploy more software at the industrial edge. Industrial servers can run distributed control system (DCS) software managing large I/O counts, historians, and software-based programmable logic controllers (PLCs), analytics and asset performance management applications that depend on real-time edge data sent to unified operations centers or the cloud. Organizations also should be able to consolidate the software stack required to run an entire factory in one compute platform optimized for the edge.

Stratus’ ftServer is a fully integrated, continuously available hardware and software solution that enables companies to run business-critical workloads in the control room, local data center or edge environment. It has better than five-nines availability, eliminates unplanned downtime and data loss and ensures all transactions are processed and applications run continuously. 2021 versions of the products deliver up to 50% greater performance over the prior generation. Courtesy: Stratus

Stratus’ ftServer is a fully integrated, continuously available hardware and software solution that enables companies to run business-critical workloads in the control room, local data center or edge environment. It has better than five-nines availability, eliminates unplanned downtime and data loss and ensures all transactions are processed and applications run continuously. 2021 versions of the products deliver up to 50% greater performance over the prior generation. Courtesy: Stratus

Industrial servers should have continuous availability, dual-data processing subsystems

Since downtime in critical business applications can have far-reaching economic, security and legal consequences, any failure recovery, however rapid, is no longer an option. Several methods can help improve the availability of business applications, such as backup and recovery or clustering, but they rely on recovering from an outage or failure versus preventing them to begin with. Industrial servers achieve continuous availability by using a proprietary hardware-based approach that leverages lockstep processing.

Unlike methods that depend on rapid recovery, a platform can execute the same transactions, process the same threads and write the same data at the same time on two different subsystems. If one subsystem fails, the other continues to run, acting as the primary system and tolerating the fault that has occurred.

By providing a fault-tolerant computing environment that eliminates the need for complex configuration, application rewrites or scripting and helps keep a company’s most mission-critical workloads, an industrial server platform saves companies time and money, and safeguards reputations.

Industrial servers help edge computing resolve bandwidth, latency, security issues

With more data being collected in an always-on global economy, companies need solutions that enable them to streamline operations and glean insights into where improvements can be made. Edge computing solves challenges related to bandwidth, latency and security, so organizations can ensure systems run continuously and collect the necessary data to improve processes. Industrial servers should fit a wide range of processor-intensive and data-intensive applications running in environments with low unplanned downtime thresholds and/or limited information technology (IT) staff.

As manufacturers and others invest in edge technology as part of digital transformation initiatives, industrial servers should deliver simple, protected, autonomous edge computing capabilities that integrates with existing infrastructure, reduces cost and converges operational technology (OT) and IT for reliability and future growth.

DoShik Wood is director, global product marketing and communications, Stratus. Edited by Mark T. Hoske, content manager, Control Engineering, CFE Media and Technology, mhoske@cfemedia.com.

KEYWORDS: Industrial server advice, Engineers’ Choice Awards

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How are you using continuously available industrial servers to improve operations?


Author Bio: DoShik Wood is director, global product marketing and communications, Stratus.