Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hi again and welcome to this new session of UAO Goes Live. I'm happy to have you today just back from the last slide that we had. It was on the SPS Fair in Nuremberg, Germany, where we had the chance to see multiple demonstrations of the technology. One UAO demo with a brand new solution. One of the demonstrations based on the cloud commissioning and virtual commissioning together. with a machine showing discrete manufacturing in action together with the UL technology. And last but not least, we were there as well with the startup Emerim showing their technology and showing how they can bring all their system integrators to become universal. So topic of today, I'm here with the company Stratus and with Rudy. Hi, Rudy.

• Speaker #1

  Hello, Greg.

• Speaker #0

  Hi, really. Thank you for being with us today. I've heard you join us from Dallas. So that's quite a good morning for you.

• Speaker #1

  Yes, thank you. And thank you for having me.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a pleasure to talk to you. So, Stratus is one of the newest members of the U.S. information platform. And today you will tell us more about your company, about the product, basically one product on which...

• Speaker #1

  That's correct. We're a new member. We've been going through the process of validating everything on UAO Runtime, validating it on our critical application platforms and doing all the testing. Very excited to introduce ourselves to you and to your community and tell you how we can help bring some of these projects to market. protect them.

• Speaker #0

  Yes, great, great. And I'm sure our viewers are eager to see what you have to tell us. So I propose to give you the floor.

• Speaker #1

  So as Greg mentioned, my name is Rudy De Anda with Stratus Technologies and I'm going to walk you guys a little bit through who Stratus is, first and foremost, who is Stratus, what's our technology, what are our products, and then really I'm going to... I hope to educate you a bit on how we can enable UAO deployments. And then lastly, of course, how you can find us and how we go to market today. So without further ado, I will begin. So Stratus, for those of you who have not heard of us, we are actually part of our parent company, which is Penguin Solutions. Penguin Solutions publicly traded. organization since 1988. Stratus has been around for over 40 years. But now as part of Penguin Solutions, we're part of the broader organization that's bringing both AI solutions to market as well as where Stratus focuses, which is protecting critical applications at the edge. Here are a few of the figures of Penguin, our parent company, and where you find this. So Please do not be confused when you hear Penguin Solutions versus Stratus. Stratus is a brand that sits within Penguin. So with that in mind, when we double click on Stratus, we've been in business over 40 years and really we're focused on critical applications. We often say we provide IT solutions for OT organizations. We're focused on protecting the most critical applications compute. applications across many, many different verticals. Here you see a few examples of some of the verticals where we have quite a bit of history, customer use base and success, as well as some of the metrics that show the breadth of how far spread out we are within some of the Fortune 100 companies. So as you can see, We're everywhere across from retail to finance, oil and gas, energy, food and bev, buildings and manufacturing. And really, we can apply to multiple verticals. although our focus really is just OT organizations. We are also a global company. So, you know what this means, we've got offices. These are some of our manufacturing sites and headquarter offices for our companies. This map does not show where we have some of our services deployments and other sales offices, for example, but this shows. our major manufacturing sites across the globe. So to talk to you a little bit about our products and what we're bringing to market here with UAO and what our offering is going to be, we're going to talk a little bit about two of our main products. And that is the Stratus ZTC Edge, which you see on the left hand of your screen. and the Stratus ZTC endurance. So to begin, I'll start with the ZTC edge. Probably first and foremost, what we're known for is very high availability and fault-tolerant systems. The ZTC edge is designed to give you five nines of availability on any application that you're protecting in the environments that it's designed to deploy in. So the ZTC Edge is a fanless, no moving parts server, class machine. It's designed to go into your far, rugged, hot, cold, humid, vibration-filled environments. It's got a class 1 div 2 rating. And as you can see here, it actually, what we show is we show two nodes connected by redundant communications between the two. and i'll get into some of that technology and what we're doing with the ztc edge the ztc endurance is a rack mount server solution as you start getting into some of your larger more compute heavy applications and environments we go to more traditional rack mount solution the ztc endurance provides seven nines of availability out of the box and a fault tolerant. architecture that guarantees no downtime and no data loss. So really, that is our core focus in what we do. We do that through a combination of our technology, redundancy, as well as services. So I'll hop into that next. For those of you who are not familiar with the term fault tolerance versus high availability, I'd like to start there because this really is key to what Stratus brings to market. There is a difference. Both high availability and fault tolerant provide redundancy in hardware. But there is a difference to how we handle the failover that can define whether you have a highly available system versus a fault tolerant system. So what I'm going to do is go through this graphic and show you. First and foremost, we're going to start at this dual node system at the top. One of the things you're going to see first and foremost is that the primary system is the top node. Your redundant system is the bottom node. And then what we're going to show as well here in our data is that you have both in-flight data as well as stored data. Okay. And everything is running fine. You are good to go in both your in-flight data and your stored data are coming along and protected. And then you introduce a primary node failure. We all know that in the field, equipment fails, whether it's on its own or part of the environment. You know, we know that equipment will fail at some point in time. So when equipment fails in a high availability system, what we do is we say, OK, all my stored data is completely backed up. on my other system. So I haven't lost any of my stored data. However, what I'm going to do is I need to restart the application on my secondary node. And so that process of restarting an application takes a certain amount of time depending on your application and your configuration and the load. And during that time, all of your in-flight data will not be processed nor captured until your system completes. firing back up, and then your applications will begin to capture in-flight data again and synchronize it with your stored data. So no stored data would be lost in a high availability cluster. Now that's good for some applications, but especially in a 61499 environment, we know that storing the, I'm sorry, your in-flight data is very important and it can have real world impacts on equipment that is running in the field. So for that reason, I'll walk you through what happens in a fault tolerant environment. We're going to have the same configuration in a fault tolerant environment where we have a primary node and a secondary node. We have redundant communication between the two, just like we do before. However, the difference will be in failure mode. So again, we have our in-flight data is just fine and our stored data is fine. However, when the primary node fails, what you see is that there is no loss of in-flight data. And that's because part of what Stratus is doing is the application that is running on this primary node is already also running on the secondary node. So when you lose a primary node, we just tell the secondary node, hey, you're up, you're active now, take over. And this means that... your in-flight data will not be lost and of course all your stored data will be mirrored. Hi Greg, can you confirm?

• Speaker #0

  I can hear you back,

• Speaker #1

  yeah. Ah yes, did I lose you?

• Speaker #0

  Slightly, but now it's working so you can continue.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, great. Our internet is not fault tolerant.

• Speaker #0

  Happens sometimes.

• Speaker #1

  Yes, yes. This is a good example of why we need processing power at the edge, right?

• Speaker #0

  Yes.

• Speaker #1

  So I'm not sure where you lost me there, Greg. So basically you got to explain the difference between fault.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just explained that. That was good.

• Speaker #1

  Okay. Great, thank you. So in a fault tolerant environment, you also have a primary node and a secondary node, just like you have in a high availability cluster. However, the difference is going to be in how a system may fail over. So in a fault tolerant mode, what happens is when a node fails, it's already being received by the application in the secondary node. The application is being mirrored and checkpointed any in-flight data when you are running in a fault tolerant mode. Your stored data is going to be mirrored also. but what this means system and by your application and you won't miss anything that that was happening in the field um so really the the difference is going to be no loss of in-flight data and no disruption to your application and then you can begin to do maintenance on your secondary system. So I hope that was clear even with the interruptions, but if not, please feel free to ask questions and we can come back to cover the subject if necessary. So with Stratus and with your ZTC Edge, one of the things that you can do is Stratus comes out of the box. A ZTC Edge comes with our hypervisor built in. So we have a hypervisor that comes to you and you can use it just to virtualize your environment. You can deploy a simplex strata ZTC edge system that will protect your applications all on its own. It still does the health monitoring and can do predictive. However, we don't have a redundant node to fail over to in case there is any failures. So in a single node deployment, if you decide hey i just need virtualization and i need that to be easy you can certainly go with a single node deployment however if you decide that you want to add redundancy and an extra level of protection to your system you can add a secondary node and this is as simple as taking another physical node connecting it and going into your system and pairing the two you can you can do do this again with zero downtime. Now, Obviously, in a paired mode is when you're going to get the benefits of high availability or fault tolerance. And within our platform, you can choose per virtual machine. Hey, this virtual machine is running all of my critical applications. I want it to be fault tolerant. This other one is running some less critical applications that I can afford a few minutes of downtime. I'm going to save resources and run it in a high availability configuration. You've got the freedom to choose that within your platform per virtual machine. Some of the other things to note is that you can separate these into two physical locations. So you can have them in separate cabinets if you wish. You know, maybe in separate areas of the facility. There just are some minimum bandwidth and latency requirements for your redundancy. networks that we're doing are synchronizing over. And last and not least, I believe I've said it, but just to reiterate the point, a lot of this redundancy pairing, it happens under the application layer at the hardware layer. So you're not going to see it. It's going to be invisible to your applications. We're automatically sharing system resources. the system can automatically move. workloads to make sure it's running most efficiently and handle a lot of that workload balancing on your behalf. So how we do some of this under the hood, you know, and our approach to both virtual machines as well as containers and orchestration, really. You know, I know orchestration is a big part of UAO. You know, I loved watching the presentation with Barbara. I think their tool is fantastic. And so we take a slightly hybrid approach when it comes to virtual machines and orchestration. And really, this is from what the market has asked us for. And the way we do and handle containers within Stratus is that we actually always run virtual machines. And then with Within a virtual machine, we can deploy containerized offerings. So what you'll see is that many times our box and our physical device ends up being the convergence point between IT and OT. And this means that many different departments may have applications that need to run at the edge and be protected. And with that comes the need for dedicated resources to support those applications. So what we may see, for example, is that, hey, VM1 may be your traditional OT team. It may be your SCADA team, your HMI team. And then you may have another team here that's doing IoT solutions and analytics, and they've got their own stack of applications that they need to support. And then you might have a cybersecurity team, for example, that needs to deploy cybersecurity solutions to the edge. And then you might have yet another team that has a specific. function whether it's leak detection or device management or whatever your business needs are and so um what we do is we provide segregation of these resources and dedicated dedicated each of those teams by creating virtual machines. And then each team is allowed to deploy traditional applications, manage their own operating system, their own patches, their own update. And if they so wish, they can run containerized applications, deploy their own orchestration layer and manage their box. Now, one of the things that we've done, you know, Stratus has been a open platform since our inception and We've decided to take the approach that we want our devices to be manageable by whatever your control and orchestration platforms are versus forcing you into our tool. So what our team is is Working on is development of API's that can help you manage our nodes and our devices With whatever your orchestration tool may be And this allows you to easily integrate a fault-tolerant platform into your existing architecture, leverage our APIs to use any functions you need to deploy and support everything remotely, while still having a protected and segregated environment that is manageable per workload by each team that you need. So we really do think that this combination is what um allows and enables a lot of this ITOT convergence and really some of the friction points that we see in the market so often. So that's a little bit about our technology and what we're doing under the hood and how it runs. But I would say the technology is only half of the story here. When you're talking about delivering seven nines or five nines of availability, It's not just about preventing failures and avoiding failures. It's also about how you recover from failures. This is part of the way Stratus has built our products, as well as our support teams to go behind. First and foremost, what we do is we do system monitoring that's built into our systems. When we have this monitoring, we're actively predicting if any units are going to fail. fail, if any components are going to fail, if anything's going to happen. We run the diagnostics. If we start to see that something's going wrong, many times we can prevent it and even repair, do some of our repairs within the system itself so it can self-heal. We're monitoring over 500 potential alarms in our system and doing diagnostics. If and when a component does fail, because that does happen in the field, our devices are designed in a way that your operations team will not notice, right? Your application keeps running, you have a hard drive failure or whatever it is, your operation keeps running. However, the server will actually phone home to Stratus and it'll say, hey, I have a failed component or I'm about to fail. And the system itself can automatically order its replacement. parts. So what this means for the experience to the end user is that many times they will receive a box and they will say, hey, Stratus, I received this ZTC Edge node, but I didn't order one. What's going on? And we say, hey, go look in your cabinet. One of them has a blinking red light. That server has actually had a catastrophic failure. Physically pull it out, install your new one. um and the system i think this is one of the most important parts the system can automatically reduplex itself so you don't need it professionals to come in and reinstall the hypervisor and you know reconfigure the system restart your applications resynchronize everything script everything all of those it functions are automated the system is designed to detect the new parts and take running data from the other system while hot and re-duplex itself with zero downtime and get us back to a point where we're just monitoring our system. So to reiterate, it really is a combination of the technology and what the technology can do to ride through a failure combined with the services and the model that helps you get back up from any failures that you may have experienced. And that's how we can deliver five and seven nines of availability into these very harsh OT environments. So just to just to reiterate on our service, we do have a follow the sun system. So we have offices and every time zone around the around the globe that so that we'll pick up the phone and help you 24 seven. You know, over 99% of issues are resolved remotely without the need to. deploy new hardware or deploy anyone to the field. Every once in a while you do need to. Really, it's a one-stop platform for all your OS support. Another thing that's important that is often overlooked is that Stratus doesn't really tell you we're going to end of support a product. If you purchase a platform and you continue to invest in support for that platform, we continue to support it on our end. And typically, our compute devices are in the field for about two times longer than the industry standard. Again, this is because we've always been a company designed for OT. And we know that in the OT world, tech refreshes and system refreshes are a tough time. and many times systems are deployed for a lot longer time. So within our services, we do offer professional services to help you deploy and support your systems. We offer managed services to help you keep your systems up and running, and obviously education and certification services are available to help you become self-sufficient on your stratus system. I've shared here some of the specifications of the ZTC Edge. for your consumption. As we mentioned before, ZTC Edge, it is a server class machine. We're not talking about an IPC here. We're talking about a machine with 10 cores, two terabytes of storage, you know, multiple NICs, because we do expect you to run multiple images on this system. But then some of the places where it begins to look a little like IPC is in its ability and ruggedness, right? So it's negative 4 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, negative 20 to 60 in Celsius for my European friends. It's been tested for shock and vibration. It's got a 24 volt input power, right? A wide input range because we know power is not always clean and perfect in the field and low power is required. It is DIN rail mount. wall mount or din rail mount so you could put it in a cabinet next to a plc no problem um and it does come with a class one division two um rating so it is designed to go into the most rugged of environments um and as we mentioned before it does come with stratus redundant linux which is our hypervisor already built in perpetual license as part of the device um and and we do support Windows and Linux guest operating systems. And as mentioned before, you can choose whether it's high availability or fault tolerant at the VM level. To show you a little bit about our ZTC Endurance, ZTC Endurance, as I mentioned before, is a system designed for higher workloads, more dense workloads. So really if... if your applications are too big for a ZTC edge, that's where we start to move you into a ZTC endurance platform. Now, you can see here, we have three models, 3100, 5100, 7100. This is not a requirement, hey, only 12 VMs, but that's a recommendation of about the number of VMs that you may run on each system. Here's how many cores you have on each one. And I think one of the important things to mention with ZTC Endurance is that this is actually a completely different technology from what we're doing with ZTC Edge. Our ZTC Endurance can actually, every application that runs on it is fully redundant. And we are achieving this beneath the hypervisor. So you can bring your own hypervisor. If you want to run VMware, Hyper-V, or... you want to run you know rel whatever your the hypervisor is or operating system is that you want to run that's what that's what you can install at the base level and integrate into a lot of times into your more it-centric workloads but again this one does not come with our hypervisor and we're achieving the fault tolerance and the seven nines of availability beneath the operating system layer. invisible to your applications, single license, single deployment of your applications and hypervisor that is running on this hardware, even though it is redundant. So enough about our products. I'm going to get a little bit into now how we're seeing them used in the field and how we think this can be leveraged by the UAO community. One of the examples that I want to show here that you know our our customers are doing again uh this is on ctc edge right so you may think a small machine a small production line uh maybe a remote uh operation um right this one here i believe is an is an example from the oil and gas world but um one of the things that we're seeing is they can take uh first and foremost right cyber security you may be connecting this up to a broader um broader system maybe you're running the platform

• Speaker #0

  form or a or a different SCADA at your command and control center you can protect that application with something like a CTC endurance and then you come in and I'll elaborate on this one a little bit in the next slide but you come in and you can also deploy and tunnel in with your cyber security applications right so utilizing your secure remote access tunnels maybe virtualized firewalls, doing network detection and response, etc. And then you're going to have a virtual machine to do local control. Maybe you're HMI. Maybe you're running HMI and a small historian there locally. Another common, and that may be in a different operating system. So maybe you need to support Linux for that. And then many customers in this case, they're doing device management. So IoT functions or, you know, maybe some. applications to configure and manage your heart devices in the field or some of your other smart devices in the field you can host those applications there locally on your ctc edge system and then last and certainly not least is a lot of your control and and containerize these and run them here locally in the field deployed from a from a higher level system Now, what you may see in a configuration such as this is you may see that, hey, this one has the most resources and it's fault tolerant because it's my most critical application. And maybe this one right here, maybe I don't even make it high availability. Maybe I run it simplex. This one and this one and this one, I make high availability. Again, you decide on your own based on your operations and your tolerance to any downtime. But this is a configuration that. that we see in the field and then obviously you would um you would reach out from your controllers here talk to your remote i o and connect to your field devices to um you know do anything you need to do actually in the field another example that i have here um very similar with uh with with um the one that i showed before but the thing that i'd like to show in this one is you know show a little bit more of what we're doing on the cyber security side uh so for example in this application and what what the P's here stand for is physical ports in the back of your ZTC edge. As you can see right here, right, you have six COM ports that are coming out of the back. And the way this is configured is actually COM port one here, we say Fortinet has access to COM port one. And Fortinet is, in this scenario, is our virtual firewall. So it is going to have access to COM port one and COM port three down here. And what it's going to do is it's going to manage all the traffic and be our firewall. So we would put one physical switch that's coming in from our IT network into port one. And then everything else, port three, port four, five, and six would go to an OT switch that is fully managed by your virtual firewall. Then within that secondary OT network that we have now created. utilizing this ForteVet image, we can use Clarity's Xdome to do network detection and response, scan your OT network, make sure that no bad guys are there and no one is attacking you, and monitor that in real time, as well as keep track of all your assets. Then within that OT network, obviously you can run all you may deem necessary in the field, as well as any of your traditional SCADA type applications that You know, maybe it's HMIs, maybe it's a system platforms configuration, whatever it is you need to run in the OT world. Again, all of these are going to not know that they are running in a redundant fashion. They're running on top of Stratus redundant Linux virtualization platform. And Stratus handles all of the fault tolerance and redundancy underneath the hood. so you can confidently. deploy simplex applications and trust that the hardware is protecting everything that's running on top of it now a um a slightly um you know more brought out maybe the others were a machine or a line or a small remote application this might be a configuration that we see um maybe in a more traditional and larger manufacturing or enterprise-wide environment. And so what we see in those scenarios, right, is that you're still going to have a lot of first and foremost at the top, you can have your connections to the cloud and have a hybrid environment because we certainly recommend that hybrid environments are the... And you may also be connecting your high performance compute clusters. Again, this is part of what we're doing on the penguin side and running AI and doing your analytics all in the cloud, right? But what we're seeing then is that you may have, depending on your enterprise architecture, maybe each site or maybe each manufacturing site is going to have its own endurance server where you may be running some of your, you know, your, to use a term from the IT world, your enterprise type applications. You can run those and protect them on a ZTC endurance that is dedicated for a specific site. And then you push down to specific lines and units and run your more traditional UAO runtime historians, HMI, and cybersecurity applications. So again, it is a flexible platform that allows you to decide where physically can I deploy this. makes sense in the field based on my operations, my network, my latency, and bring protection. So, you know, in summary of our products and what we do and why we think this is a very good fit, and we're excited about UAO, you know, Stratus, we are an open and agnostic compute platform, you know, our call to action is all about protecting and providing you with zero touch computing for your mission critical applications right no downtime is is what we focus on when we build our products we focus on on three main things first and foremost is it's simple this could mean not only easy to install but supportable from from your ot and it teams right whoever is in the field becomes your IT expert when you have Stratus because we simplify all of the complexities of deployment management and perfection and protection Protected this is likely what we're most well known for right everybody thinks about you have a system not go down That's when you use Stratus. So we protect you from any compute failures any hardware failures and and help protect you from things that may go wrong in the field, as well as cybersecurity protection. It's a secure platform and we can help you extend and promote your cybersecurity posture at the edge. And then last and certainly not least is autonomous. The autonomy of what we bring is all about how you recover from failures, how the system can heal itself. When it has you know certain faults the system can heal itself transparent to your to your um production teams. When you do need to replace a node, you don't need an IT expert in the field because the system can automatically reduplex itself and do all of that, automate all of your IT functions. And it's not just how you ride through a failure, it's how you recover from one as well. So when you think of Stratus, hopefully these are some of the key takeaways of what our platforms bring to you. your market and to your, you know, that, that brings, brings me to the end. You know, if you have any questions, I've put my, my number and my email there as well as our website. The last thing I'll leave you with is we have a, a, a lot of go-to-market partners with system integrators, some of which are already UAO members as well as, you know, lots of representation within the EOT market, wherever you may be in the globe. So if you have any questions or would like to collaborate, please feel free to reach out to myself or to your local Stratas team.

• Speaker #1

  Thank you, Rudi. Thank you for this introduction. I so if some of the viewers want to ask some questions, please just comment the live and send us your question. But meanwhile, let's say, have one for you already. And it's more in the process of, let's say... When you joined Universal Automation.org, what was your idea? What was your motivation to join our organization?

• Speaker #0

  Oh, thank you. That's a great question. So, you know, I'd say first and foremost, you know, a lot of the values of what UAO stands for with openness and interoperability really aligned with who we are as Stratus. You know, we've... we've been around for over 40 years and we've always been an open platform. You know, we are our call to action is all about protecting applications and protecting critical applications and enabling some of these new digital solutions to go into the field. So I'd say first and foremost, the calling for for openness is a was a big part. You know, second, I would say it has a lot to do with These are the same ecosystems that we're already working with and a lot of the same applications that we were seeing our customers come to us and ask us for transparently. And our customers said, hey, I don't just want to do a vendor locked solution. Stratus, can we use your hypervisor and deploy solutions from multiple vendors? And our approach has always been yes. and the open approach from UAO really has been enabling for our customers. So it really did seem like a natural fit. And lastly, I'd say is really around what we view ourselves as an enabling technology to give credibility to a lot of the applications from UAO, right? You are very critical applications, and it's very easy for someone to say, Oh, that doesn't work simply because you had a compute failure or a hardware failure. So we believe that it is a really good combination to say, hey, we can make sure these applications are up and running because they are critical applications. And if they are critical, they need to be protected because people will depend on them.

• Speaker #1

  And what you just mentioned and what you showed us during your presentation with, I think it was ZTC-H, product which now has the UAO runtime ported on to. which is actually now available on our website. So viewers can go on the UAO website and see this product listed as one of the offers, which is, let's say, running with the UAO runtime, which is a great separate. And, well, for me, it's always about, you know, we've been talking a lot about the members of Universal Automation. a lot about the users, but as well the vendors. And I think you are maybe the second or the third vendor which is coming live to do this, to this LinkedIn. So thank you for making it first. I still don't see any questions. So I think your presentation has been quite clear. So thank you again. Thank you again for that. Let's maybe put your details on the screen. on the download screen. So Rudy, yeah, if people want to contact you, they can directly send you a message, I presume. And, well, I thank you for joining us today. Just for the viewers, small info, we have a special edition of the LinkedIn Live next Tuesday, which is this time focused on the v24.0 release. So you have had a live on this release with our chief architect officer, Sarath. He's been driving you through the features which came with that new release of the runtime. And the new, let's say, the next LinkedIn Live will be focused on that point. So I really encourage you to come and join us for this special edition. It will be quite fun. yeah mark your calendar and and take some time to be with us rudy thank you again for making it thank you and uh see you to the viewers see you next time on on tuesday hopefully bye bye