IoTium announces availability of OT-Edge
Industrial IoT company IoTium introduced a new container-based platform, dubbed OT-Edge, which it claims is the first edge-cloud infrastructure solution built on remotely managed Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source platform, which has become the de facto standard of container orchestration. Edge computing, by contrast, is a way of extending cloud capabilities to the edge of a cellular network to improve the performance of applications. What OT-Edge does is brings Kubernetes to the edge of the network where it can reside within a node.
IoTium noted its OT-Edge is specifically geared toward brownfield industrial and manufacturing environments that use the IIoT. The platform enables mission-critical data to stay on-premises when data has to be kept locally to address compliance, security, latency or other practical concerns.
“Our innovative Network-as-a-Service (OT-Net) solution made its mark on industrial organizations across multiple vertical markets with its ability to simplify all deployment complexity related to securely and rapidly moving data from brownfield industrial assets to the cloud,” said Ron Victor, founder and CEO of IoTium, in a statement. “With real industrial deployments in multiple verticals, we’ve gained unique understanding of the problems on the factory floor and have recognized scenarios where data simply can’t be moved without significant cost or risk. This is how our IoTium OT-Edge solution was born.”
Companies can move applications rather than data to the edge using the platform. The process of deploying applications at scale across the edge can be collapsed into a single click through IoTium’s cloud-based industrial app store. This ought to help reduce the operational expenditure (OPEX) costs anchored to local management and manual upgrades at the edge, according to the company.
What makes the platform unique, however, is it decouples application development from large-scale deployment. Rather than force proprietary Software Development Kits (SDKs), agents and tools, OT-Edge uses microservices based on Dockerized applications. This allows organizations to make customizable services and frees them from being limited by a single vendor’s proprietary SDK.
“Kubernetes has been widely adopted because it solves the problem of deployment and management of applications but is not remotely manageable on its own across the WAN. We have created the ability to manage application pods remotely for IIoT at scale,” said IoTium CTO Sri Rajagopal. “With our OT-Edge offering, we’re taking Kubernetes to the shop floor, making it truly applicable to the unique needs of the IIoT and helping organizations to escape the confines of vendor lock-in.”
