HPE EL products
Here at HPE Discover in Madrid HPE has announced the EL300 edge server – a convergence of IT with OT (Operational Technology) components for use in industrial control organisations. It is a fan-less rack-mounted product using Intel’s i5 processors with maximums of 32GB memory and 3TB storage priced upwards from $2,532 in the US. It includes wired and wireless communications. It fits below the (already-introduced) EL1000 and EL4000); the model numbers alone show that it plans many more in years to come – utilising some of the $4b investment it declared in June it plans to spend over the next 4 years.
This isn’t a point product; it is an ‘OT Link’ platform allowing for a vast variety of cards to be added from HPE and partners over time. HPE’s industrial partners include ABB, Eaton, Schneider Electric, Keysight , National Instruments, sparkcognition GE Digital and many others.
Endorsements from Keysight and CenterPoint Energy
At its pre-announcement HPE was joined two companies – both of which talked about the advantages of digitising OT environements. In particular:
- Keysight was spun off from Agilent in 2014 (Agilent was originally part of HP before being unbundled – I wrote about that 19 years ago!). It is a $4b OT supplier. Christopher Cain told us that speeding up IT decision-making is becoming vital as we design new products such as autonomous cars, which need to react at sub 1 msec rates. It makes products which will plug into Edge Line systems and has a similar vision to HPE in seeing the need to accommodate tens of thousands of devices into the converged OT and IT world over coming years
- CenterPoint Energy is a Houston-based energy supplier. It supplies electricity to 2.4m households locally, gas to 3.5m in 6 States and is a wholesaler of energy across the US. Dr Steve Pratt told us it made a decision to become a ‘digital utility’ back in 2007, moving away from a hundred years of operating in the same way. In the past it was impossible to know what was happening at the edge; but by adding edge computing he effectively has a 5 km2 Data Center, no longer having to ship data back to his actual data centers or cloud instances for processing. Speed of automated decision making is also important to him; when it has a supply problem switching the source has to be done in 700 msec. He believes that future advances could extend his company’s ‘edge’ to the whole of the us for all of its offerings.
In HPE’s own presentation it talked up the analogy between its converged systems and the iPhone. We used to have separate cameras, music players and telephones; Apple’s value was to bring them together into a platform which could provide new services (such as Uber’s) due to the utility of convergence.
Will HPE succeed?
These are my concerns:
- I’m worried about the differences between the OT and IT worlds (one reason HPE spun off Agilent was the differences in approaches at the time – not only were product life cycles much slower in industrial products, but even the people working on them were paid less).
- I doubt whether there will be rapid convergence – even in IT systems there is still a division of labour between those working on servers, storage and networking, despite the clear success of CI and HCI systems over the last 18 months. One reason Cisco UCS has been more successful than HPE converged systems is perhaps that its users are the (higher paid) network admins rather than the server and storage ones.
- Also HPE is just one IT supplier addressing this market. You should never expert a card designed to fit into a Dell server ever to fit into an HPE chassis.
- Compliance and security issues are also even more serious and problematic in OT environments than IT ones; just imagine what might have happened if the Stuxnet cyber attack on Iranian nuclear facilities had directly effected its OT systems and devices alongside its IT ones!…
Nevertheless this is an important development. As long as HPE and its customers concentrate on expanding productivity rather than replacing expert workers with technology and the security issues are designed into OT equipment, products such as the EL300 will help bring the advantages of IT-like operations to industrial processes.