Is Central Practical, or really Distributed Solution Leveraging Micro Data centers, provides a really the Practical Way to go Industry Solutions

In the last couple of weeks I have come across a number of very large opportunities (10 Million I/O) that challenge the traditional thinking of potentially “central” systems.

The key is these are distributed operational systems, in supervisory control, information systems, and Operational control (MES) systems. With distributed vale generating assets (plants) of different sites, but with the many sites orchestrated together into a working align value chain. But today's production requires flexibility and agility requiring “actionable decisions” to be taken at all levels of the Vale chain.

At the “edge” e.g. the field plants decisions must be able to made, and that means the information, and ability act is local, with a timely response. So while Central data centers with master data storage and applications is logical, it is only practical to have distributed systems.

Last week I was speaking at conference and one of my fellow speakers talk about “Micro Data Centers” as the next wave in industrial computing following the banks etc. This appealed to me as faced these large opportunities where they want 99.99% uptime, and responsive systems. While we have developing the software to addressed distributed “peer to Peer” systems, and solutions, the key is the associated hardware. 

So what is a Micro Data Center???A micro-datacenter is a smaller containerized datacenter system designed to solve different problems or to handle different workloads. A micro-datacenter (MDC) is a smaller, containerized (modular) datacenter system that is designed to solve different sets of problems or to take on different types of workload that cannot be handled by traditional facilities or even large modular datacenters.

Whereas an average container-based datacenter hosts dozens of servers and thousands of virtual machines (VMs) within a 40ft shipping container, a micro-datacenter includes fewer than 10 servers and less than 100 VMs in a single 19in box. Just like containerized datacenters, MDCs come with in-built security systems, cooling systems and flood and fire protection.

This blog is worth a read:http://blog.schneider-electric.com/tag/micro-data-centers/

With some interesting comments:“Their size, versatility and plug-and-play features make them ideal for use in remote locations, for temporary deployments or even for use by businesses temporarily in locations that are in high-risk zones for floods or earthquakes. They could even serve as a mini-datacenter for storage and compute capacity on an oil tanker.We have already discussed that Micro data centers are breakthrough solutions, but we are still in the early adoption phase and the market potential is untold. Where are they already in use? How fast will the market ramp up?Actually, you may already be using micro data centers and don’t even know it. The demands of real-time (or near real-time) data processing needs in environments with factory automation (robots), industrial automation (cranes), and bidding or trading stocks and bonds, for example, call for the capabilities micro data centers provide.The sheer amount of data required in such industries like oil and gas drilling and exploration, construction and mining also require processing to be on site and so they do not go through latency increasing hubs.Other sites may not have as much big data, but micro data centers offer advantages through standardization fast deployment, ease of management and troubleshooting and security, not to mention cost effectiveness.But the use case on the horizon with the greatest potential is a massive distributed network of micro data enters to form a content distribution network. This processing on the edge will support the commercial Internet of Things (IoT), including the fast emerging category of wearable devices.   The processing of data could be reduced to mili-seconds here.
Forbes recently reported on the massive size of the IoT — expecting worldwide market solutions to reach a value of $7.1 trillion by 2020 and connected devices to double by then to 40+ billion. While micro data centers might be a niche today, they will become more ubiquitous as they will be needed to facilitate this unprecedented connectivity.”

So when looking at these distributed Industrial Architectures these “small Bunker” micro Centers have the real opportunity to provide a distributed hardware architecture with practical capability to support a distributed Industrial Application of tiered historians and application servers.

Collaborative Manufacturing is Becoming a Reality

The concept of Collaborative Manufacturing has been attempted in the past and successfully with Toyota and others but the time has come for a change that will enable an ecosystem of small agile manufacturers to form a “product value chain”. So lets start with what is Collaborative Manufacturing:

In Collaborative Manufacturing, designated individuals and organizations – both internal to a manufacturing enterprise and extended to its suppliers, customers, and partners – work together for mutual gain. The objectives of Collaborative Manufacturing are to streamline end-to-end business and supply chain processes and provide a more comprehensive and

accurate information base from which to make decisions.

Collaborative Manufacturing allows multiple groups to act together as they set plans and policy, agree to actions, and execute operations. Collaborative Manufacturing can boost responsiveness, agility, and customer-centricity. It also fosters the most cost-effective methods to design, source, make, deliver, and service standard, mass-customized or to-order products.

An effective Collaborative Manufacturing strategy requires business processes to include more inputs and interactions than most traditional processes. To support Collaborative Manufacturing, information systems must integrate and aggregate information from across the manufacturing business and from its suppliers, trading partners, and customers. It must also provide the means to intelligently distribute that information across various business entities.

So why now what is different?

Key to me is that fact that small enterprises can now leverage “Managed service” in the cloud that deliver the rich operational business capability of inventory management, operational process and manufacturing, and specification management which was only available to much larger companies. Now an end to end product chain can be developed with aligned a process and enable a product manufacturer to divided up over multiple operations, each operation executed by a small manufacturing entity.

The transparency of the product manufacturer across the sites all using “managed services “ in the cloud for ERP/ Order fulfillment, and MES operations / quality etc., provides the visibility to enable this agility. Effectively one Product Manufacturing chain (route) is been executed updated on a particular site as the product moves through, transport, assemble are also managed in this higher MES.

Yes, it will require a new thinking and alliance of small businesses but the value on agility and cost and the ability to scale provides a real opportunity for a new manufacturer and deliver model to take on the larger companies.  

To maintain a competitive edge, manufacturers must make a major shift in strategy to effectively synchronize activities among functionally and geographically dispersed groups. Those with whom they need to collaborate include:

• customers and, in some cases, their customer’s customers;

• distributors and channel partners;

• materials and sub-product suppliers;

• outsourced or contract manufacturers;

• logistics partners for distribution, warehousing, and transportation;

• providers of services such as legal and regulatory advice;

• multiple departments and divisions within their own company and with any of those entities described above.

A Collaborative Manufacturing strategy can help a company maximizes the effectiveness of its value chain in order to better control profits and address changing market demands.

Is this real, my answer is yes, I was on a plane last week, and two fellow travelers talked about the alliance and the seeking out others to make this ecosystem, combined with the agility of 3D printing, and then assemble these two expected to grow and had a good pipeline due to satisfy the “pay on delivery, with small order sizes” also the ability to have local final assembly close to distribution centers and significant retailers make them more desirable to occupy the “shelf space”. Both agree the reality is only now that the tracking and management are common across the plants in a hosted “managed service”.

Food for thought!