Red Hat, Intel join to provide open source industrial automation to manufacturing shop floor
Open source vendor Red Hat announced a new industrial edge platform, designed in collaboration with Intel, that will provide a modern approach to building and operating industrial controls. With the platform, manufacturers will have access to a new industrial edge platform that helps build smarter and more open software-defined factories.
By transforming the way manufacturers operate, scale, and innovate with standard IT technologies delivered to the plant floor and real-time data insights, the platform will enable industrial control system (ICS) vendors, system integrators (SIs), and manufacturers to automate previously manual industrial automation tasks. These operations include system development, deployment, and management, cybersecurity risk reduction, prescriptive and predictive maintenance improvements for factory agility, co-locating deterministic and non-deterministic workloads, and reducing turnaround time.
The industrial edge platform intends to provide a holistic solution that spans from real-time shop floor control and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to full IT manageability – delivering enhanced customer choice for data gravity or edge-to-cloud style architectures and improved overall equipment efficiency (OEE).
The platform will be built on open standards and community-driven innovation, driven by thousands of developers globally, helping to drive more simplified integration with other hardware and software components. Additionally, core code transparency and a clear roadmap and release cycle help take the guesswork out of when new releases are available and their accompanying features.
To continuously support this effort, 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 like the Fedora Project and CentOS Stream. The collaboration extends to bringing these controls and platforms to Red Hat Device Edge (early access), Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and Red Hat OpenShift.
Organizations collaborating can benefit from fully integrated real-time capabilities from silicon to software, to support industrial automation for predictable performance; and advanced management and network automation for system deployment and management without heavy-handed resource usage, simplifying the industrial network creation and management using open standards-based tools. It also provides scalability and flexibility through a software-defined platform approach that facilitates more portable, scalable control and maximizes adaptability, with uninterrupted operations supported by high-availability and redundancy attributes built-in with the platform.
The deal also provides organizations with simplified AI workload integration with the ability to take an AI workload and run it next to a control workload, helping simplify hardware complexity, and enabling AI to improve product quality, system uptime, maintenance needs, and more. It also brings in enhanced cybersecurity posture by removing human error elements with automated patching and updates, an immutable operating system plane, and a platform built on hardened, production-tested components.
“From transforming traditional IT infrastructures to helping software-defined vehicles deliver scalable digital solutions across industrial edge, Red Hat has a proven history in driving not just modernization across industries, but innovation,” Francis Chow, vice president and general manager, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge at Red Hat, said in a media statement. “Now, Red Hat has set our sights on bringing that same level of transformation to manufacturing plants across the globe with a new edge platform with Intel. We believe that by helping converge both IT and operational technologies, the next industrial revolution can arrive sooner, more quickly, and built on a backbone of open source software.”
“For years, Intel and Red Hat have worked together to transform and support a range of industries,” Christine Boles, vice president in the network and edge group and general manager of federal and industrial solutions at Intel, noted. “Bringing together Red Hat’s expertise in cloud-to-edge application platform delivery and Intel’s strength in edge to cloud compute platforms, including industrial hardware and software, will deliver the software-defined capabilities and transformation to meet the resilient, flexible, and reliable requirements of today’s manufacturing.”
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