Nokia has released MX Industrial Edge, the company’s first off-the-shelf solution to assist enterprises in their Industry 4.0 journeys.
The Finnish giant says the solution addresses the 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.
Industry 4.0 is driving the digital transformations of enterprises by combining emerging technologies including AI, IoT, 5G, digital twins, and more. Enterprises that successfully harness the potential of the fourth industrial revolution are reaping the competitive benefits.
Caroline Chappell, Research Director at Analysys Mason, said:
“Enterprises are increasingly focusing their digital transformation efforts on the application of software and cloud capabilities to operational technologies (OT) to reap the benefits of agility and cost-efficiency in asset-intensive industrial environments. Enterprises need on-premise edge clouds, like the Nokia MX Industrial Edge, to provide secure, resilient, and high-performance execution environments for mission-critical OT applications.
Enterprises will be looking for an edge cloud solution partner that can tap into a broad ecosystem of cloud stack and industrial application vendors, understand their stringent operational needs, data sovereignty requirements, and which can bring a deep knowledge of the network to an increasingly complex, connected industrial landscape.”
Edge computing is making a revival amid the larger Industry 4.0 movement as a way to process increasingly large amounts of data without the latency involved with relying on a centralised cloud. By 2025, Gartner predicts that three-quarters of industrial data will be processed at the edge.
Nokia’s MX Industrial Edge unifies edge requirements through an on-premise cloud architecture that aims to remove the usual hurdles to enterprise adoption, including complexity and high costs.
Stephan Litjens, Head of Enterprise Solutions at Nokia, commented:
“Industry 4.0 is transforming asset-intensive industries by integrating and digitalizing all processes and systems across the industrial value chain. This will result in an explosion of data – and taking the right actions based on that data in near real-time will be critical to the success of digital transformation initiatives.
Ensuring performance, along with aspects like keeping data local and secure while being resilient against internet connectivity failures, are not possible with a centralised cloud, making the on-prem edge the architecture of choice for this new breed of OT applications.
The Nokia MX Industrial Edge is built from the ground up to deliver the guaranteed performance, security, and reliability that OT digitalisation use cases require.”
A variety of configurations will be available to support small and medium enterprise use-cases all the way up to large-scale industrial deployments.
The solution is based on the Nokia AirFrame Open Edge server. Using Intel CPUs for high-capacity processing, it is designed for compute-intensive tasks and advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads.
Network interface cards NICs and packet processing systems enable the solution to support large-scale 5G standalone (SA) private wireless traffic flows. Resilience and reliability is bolstered through an end-to-end, high availability (HA) architecture. Integrated orchestration features for service performance management have been implemented to guarantee performance.
“All industrial and enterprise campuses, such as factories, logistics hubs, ports, etc. are multi-solution and multi-partner environments,” added Litjens.
“By adopting an ecosystem-neutral approach and integration plug-ins, our customers get unparalleled flexibility and benefit from the widest array of applications and use cases to adopt innovations to advance their digital transformation.”
(Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash)
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