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.