99,999% Uptime
ztC Edge was designed to help companies increase operator efficiency, reduce costs and reduce downtime. This solution installs in less than an hour and can be managed completely remotely, significantly reducing the effort typically required by IT to deploy a data processing solution in the field. Self-protection and self-monitoring features help reduce unplanned downtime and ensure maximum availability in business-critical industrial applications.
How much does the downtime of your system cost you annually (and every single hour)? Find out now!
These key features help companies increase operator efficiency, reduce dependency on technical personnel, and minimize the risk of downtime:
- Integrated virtualization host and availability layer
- OT manageability
- Simplified security
- Simplified system backup and restore
- Industrial interoperability
- Scalable system replication
- Robust hot-swappable knots
- Stratus Cloud
- Automated data protection and local site recovery
- Expanded VM management
ztC Edge comes with an integrated virtualization platform called Stratus Redundant Linux. Based on the open source KVM project, it is capable of running up to 3 separate virtual machines, each with different industrial control or IIoT applications. A management tool, the ztC Console, simplifies the setup, configuration and management of virtual machines.
ztC Edge consists of redundant nodes that act as a single system. With features like live VM migration, data replication, and redundant networking, it offers instant data and application protection. The system can proactively move virtual machines from one node to another, to ensure application continuity. If it detects a network or disk failure on one node, it automatically redirects traffic or uses data on the other node, without any operator intervention.
ztC Edge nodes can be physically separated up to 40km (or even more if the network allows a maximum latency of 10ms for two-way data transmission). Applications running in one location can be continued in another location, with minimal service disruption and fully autonomous, ensuring data recovery without operator intervention.
✓ Host-based firewall: Allows each ztC Edge system to block (blacklist) or allow (whitelist) particular IP addresses, domain names, protocols or ports, using customizable IP tables. Default settings, user guides, and specific videos for Operational Technologies (OT) personnel make the firewall simple and easy to configure and manage, and complement network-based firewall solutions.
✓ Limited USB ports: They are locked in the ztC Edge system by default, until changed by an administrator. Hackers have been known to use USB ports to gain control of computer systems and spread malware. Preventing unauthorized access through your system's USB ports helps reduce the risk of intrusion or attack.
✓ Improved authentication: Restrict system access to authorized users and groups. 80% of all security breaches start with password breaches. Stronger authentication with more robust password management (e.g. weak ones not allowed, obligation to change default values) and idle session automatic logout, as well as active directory integration help ztC Edge customers to simplify access security and risk reduction.
✓ More secure communication protocols: Helps ensure data security between ztC Edge nodes and between ztC Edge and Stratus systems. Two-way encryption of communications using the latest versions of SSL and TLS helps prevent eavesdropping and tampering (for example, man-in-the-middle attacks).
✓ Safe and reliable boot: Restrict system boot to signed and verified bootloader, BIOS, driver and OS files only. It helps prevent cyber-attacks by ensuring that the first instruction executed by a ztC Edge system processor is authentic and specifically designed.
✓ Additional hardware sensor: Monitors SSD temperature, voltage, and usage to provide a continuous estimate of life expectancy. Solid state drives (SSDs) tend to fail more often over time. Monitoring the aging and usage of solid-state drives helps customers predict when they might fail. Additionally, by proactively planning for failures, customers can minimize the likelihood of data loss.
✓ Performance monitoring of applications and virtual machines: Provides greater visibility into system and application performance. Metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, and used disk space are now monitored at the virtual machine, guest operating system (OS), and application level. Customers can also set thresholds and receive alerts at the guest OS or application level.
✓ OPC UA support: Enables customers to easily incorporate ztC Edge system information into existing industrial control environments using OPC UA, a communication protocol commonly used in industrial automation. Now customers can easily configure their ztC Edge system as an OPC server, sending information to display in their dashboards and tools.
✓ Fault tolerance: The ztC Edge availability tier leverages a unique software-based check-pointing and state-pointing engine, so customers can scale the desired level of resiliency to the criticality of their workload, even at the virtual machine level . By replicating data written to disk and data in memory—even non-cached data—both nodes can take over for each other in the event of a failure. Customers can run mixed fault tolerance and high availability workloads on the same ztC Edge system. This feature is only available on the new ztC Edge 110i hardware model.
✓ New hardware model – ztC Edge 110i: Each node of a ztC Edge 110i system includes a 6-core hyperthreaded processor, 2TB SSD storage space, more customer-available Ethernet ports, and faster 10Gb Ethernet adapters than a 100i system. These changes are required to support the availability features available in Stratus Redundant Linux 2.0. These specific features have been prioritized and incorporated into our offering thanks to the feedback we have.
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Stratus ztC Edge 200i and 250i
Zero Touch Edge Computing is the perfect solution to manage up to a maximum of 10.000 I/O: the solution is designed for the pharmaceutical, F&B, chemical, oil, gas and other highly regulated or critically important verticals.
Companies undergoing digital transformation find it difficult to update the IT infrastructure at the edge of their corporate networks: in practice, the "chat" IT/OT convergence still finds strong resistance.
How come? The harsh environmental conditions and the lack of qualified resources make the implementation, management and maintenance of ICS technologies present in the factory (or in any case "in the field") particularly difficult.
High performance EDGE is now considered the best solution to facilitate this process and ztC Edge is Stratus Technologies' answer to the problem.
Now in its second generation, the ZTC Edge by Stratus Technologies is designed for shared management between OT (Operation Technologies) and IT (Information Technologies): ztC Edge makes installation procedures very simple and its management both locally and remotely (also regarding monitoring and assistance on the solution itself).
Self-monitoring, self-protection and self-synchronization: ztC Edge saves companies time and money. With built-in virtualization, automated security, industrial interoperability, OT manageability, and field maintenance, ztC Edge enables quick and easy deployment of virtualized edge applications in both HA and FT.
Safe automation
ztC Edge can handle application recovery in multi-site contexts, enhancing flexibility. It also guarantees business continuity and allows you to quickly and easily protect the most important company data, minimizing the time needed to make decisions and minimizing the risk of downtime.
The skills of self-monitoring and self-protection of ztC Edge make it an ideal solution for applications in unattended stations or in remote locations where the available IT resources are limited. Being a platform capable of managing itself in total autonomy, companies do not have to worry about any operational aspect, thus saving time and resources.
Furthermore, the ztC Edge nodes can be replaced hot, thus allowing plant operators and technicians to intervene, without necessarily requiring the presence of personnel from the IT department.
Stratus cloud-based services
Further user support is offered by Stratus cloud-based services that allow you to optimize equipment condition monitoring and management operations, ensuring that applications running on ztC Edge systems are always running.
ztC Edge can be configured to continuously monitor and send system-generated logs to Stratus over a secure network. Stratus engineers are able to analyze these logs and alerts, predict failures before they occur, and address potential problems before they become more serious.
Stratus offers two service options to simplify monitoring and management of the ztC Edge, Base and Health Monitoring system:
- Il basic level includes: root cause determination, ongoing support, 30-minute responses, 3-day parts replacement, and access to service history, patches, and knowledge base through the self-service portal.
- Il health monitoring level Plus: predictive analytics, alert triggers, system log review, and continuous system health monitoring.
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