Results, Insights and Best-Practices from IIC Testbeds: INFINITE Testbed
1. INTRODUCTION
This article gathers information from the Industrial Internet Consortium’ s( IIC) INFINITE Testbed. The information and insights described in the subsequent paragraphs were captured in an interview conducted by Joseph Fontaine, VP of Testbed Programs at IIC, with Donagh Buckley, Senior Director of Dell EMC Research Europe and John O’ Sullivan, Researcher at Cork Institute of Technology( CIT).
2. INFINITE TESTBED OVERVIEW
The INternational Future INdustrial Internet TEstbed( INFINITE) was approved by the IIC Steering Committee in January 2015 and was publicly launched in June 2015. INFINITE was designed to develop software-defined infrastructures to drive the growth of Industrial Internet products and services. INFINITE is a state of the art innovation platform and ecosystem of technologies and business expertise covering sensors, gateways, connectivity, cloud, analytics and security. By recognizing that no one organization can do it alone in Industrial IoT( IIoT), INFINITE established strong collaborations between key stakeholders from different domains and sectors working on the common goal of seamless and interoperable infrastructure. From a technology point of view, INFINITE combines the international connectivity solutions from a mobile network provider, the leading Dell 5000 series gateways and Cloud platforms from Dell EMC with the analytics capabilities from Pivotal and leading security solutions from RSA. INFINITE is a strategic partnership between Dell EMC, CIT and other partners.
INFINITE is where the innovation opportunities of the IIoT – new technologies, new applications, new products, new services, new processes – will be conceived, designed, built and validated in a real-world environment to establish their commercial value before coming to market. Through use cases and proof of concepts, INFINITE tackles challenges in IIoT environments that are most important and most likely in the coming years as well as delivering impact across many industry sectors.
3. INFINITE TESTBED PROFILE
INFINITE was purpose-built as a‘ horizontal’ platform meaning that the combination of the many technologies made available by the INFINITE ecosystem will satisfy almost all of the anticipated technology requirements of future IIoT application domains across all sectors and verticals.
Given the anticipated growth in data across all IIoT sectors, the INFINITE team recognized that advanced infrastructures and technologies are needed to collect, store, and analyze data to meet the IIoT business needs of today and tomorrow. Cloud technologies and virtualization offer powerful new ways to manage and use digital information whilst offering many advantages and benefits for organisations including reduction in IT costs as well as increased scalability and agility for applications, infrastructure and services. The INFINITE team believe in a vision of a converged infrastructure for IIoT where the INFINITE innovation platform can extend and combine advanced
- 54- January 2017