Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is poised to release a new product, the Edgeline 8000, in its family of ‘converged edge systems’. The 8000 will provide the most advanced edge capabilities of any of its Edgeline entries, targeted at industrial IoT operations.
Tom Bradicich, the company’s vice president and general manager for servers, edge and IoT systems, said HPE had created its own category with its Edgeline series by converging IT and OT capabilities in a single ruggedised server box for the first time.
Systems for data acquisition, control, and networking have traditionally been kept separate of IT networks. The incoming 8000 presents the highest grade combination of these, said Bradicich, speaking last month at the opening of its IoT lab in Geneva.
“The promise is you will have enterprise-class compute and management at the edge, no longer locked in data centres, alongside operational technologies that are already there. We have lifted all that out to the edge, to where the data is,” he said.
“The 8000 does more of all of that, and it does it better. We now have high performance computing, pretty much by anybody’s definition, out at the edge with the 8000.”
The 8000, with higher processing power and larger storage, leads the portfolio from the 4000, 1000 and 300 products.
HPE claims to have invented the ‘converged edge’ category. “We pioneered an early mover [position] – that instead of sending all the data to the data centre, let’s move the compute and the control systems and bolster to the sources of data… It’s a category we lead. We invented it. There is nobody else in it,” said Bradicah.
The company’s new Industry 4.0 facility will help customers “capitalise” on the spiralling amounts of data being generated outside of data centres by devices, machines, assets and sensors at the ‘coal-face’ of industrial operations, it said.
