The press release came from Nokia. I remembered that the company had pivoted somewhat from its origin as an early mobile phone manufacturer. But I was hardly prepared for news about mission-critical Edge products. Although, true to its networking roots, the website is loaded with 5G information. Check this out as an alternative Edge resource.
In brief:
- Addresses new category of Industry 4.0 applications that require increased capabilities and performance at the network edge, and tight integration with industrial systems and networking solutions
- Combines on-premise mission-critical edge, workload lifecycle management and simplified IIoT integration in a ’one-stop’ industrial edge digitalization platform, delivering high-compute capacity, performance, resilience and security required by mission-critical connected OT use cases
- Scalable Edge as-a-service based on consumption gives enterprises a low-cost entry point, scalability and full control over data
- Nokia ecosystem-neutral approach and integration capabilities give enterprises unparalleled flexibility to swiftly adopt edge innovations from public cloud, industrial partner cloud and industrial ISV applications.
Nokia has launched the industry’s first cloud-native, mission-critical industrial edge solution to allow enterprises to accelerate their operational technology (OT) digitalization initiatives and advance their journey to Industry 4.0. The new Nokia MX Industrial Edge is a scalable application and compute solution designed to meet the mission-critical digital transformation needs of asset-intensive industries such as manufacturing, energy, and transportation. It uniquely combines compute, storage, wired/wireless networking, one-click industrial applications and automated management onto a unified, on-premise OT digital transformation platform.
Industry 4.0 requires widespread digitalization and connectivity of equipment, machines, and other assets in industrial environments. Due to the volume and velocity of data generated, and the need for real-time automation, increasingly data needs to be processed at the edge – close to where it is generated. By 2025, Gartner predicts that 75% of industrial data will be processed at the edge.
By adopting the Nokia MX Industrial Edge, enterprises will benefit from an on-premise cloud architecture that unifies edge requirements in an easy-to-use, deploy everywhere, as-a-service package. It removes the complexity, knowledge, and economic hurdles typically associated with deployment, integration and life cycle management of high-performance compute applications and mission-critical networking.
The platform’s extreme scalability enables multi-facility enterprises, such as logistics companies, to deploy the same technology in all their locations, whether large or small, making the benefits of ‘develop-once, deploy-everywhere’ a reality. The Nokia MX Industrial Edge is powered by the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (Nokia DAC), providing the enterprise a single pane of glass user experience to manage everything from applications to private wireless networking.
Nokia MX Industrial Edge comes in a variety of configurations to support small, medium, and large-scale industrial deployments. Based on the Nokia AirFrame Open Edge server, leveraging Intel’s latest innovations and CPU for high–capacity processing, the Nokia edge solution is designed for compute-intensive tasks and advanced AI/Machine Learning (ML) workloads optionally supported through graphic processing unit (GPU) support. In addition, high-performance network interface cards (NICs) and packet processing systems scale to support very large 5G standalone (SA) private wireless traffic flows. It offers extreme resilience and reliability through an end-to-end, high availability (HA) architecture, supports geographical redundancy (GR) for business continuity, and the guaranteed performance is assured via integrated orchestration features for service performance management.
Enterprise customers can accelerate their OT digitalization initiatives with the one-click deployment of industrial applications on the MX Industrial Edge. The catalog contains Nokia applications for a variety of common digitalization use cases and is complemented by applications from independent software vendors (ISV) which undergo an onboarding process testing reliability, performance, and security. In addition, Nokia’s ecosystem-neutral approach also enables industrial customers to take advantage of edge cloud compatible applications present in hyperscale clouds, as well as industrial partner clouds.
Finally, the MX Industrial Edge also simplifies southbound IIoT system integration complexity with its Industrial connectors providing industrial data protocols translation, and with the Nokia Integrated Operations Center that provides a single pane of glass view from all systems as well as helping create industrial automation workflows.
