Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (Toshiba) and Nebbiolo Technologies Inc. (Nebbiolo) have signed a strategic partnership agreement to deploy industrial IoT solutions using fog computing technology.
As strategic partners, a complete suite of infrastructure products will be developed, driving new business supporting industrial IoT architecture and specifications.
The partnership establishes a large-scale initiative in the factory IoT domain to address modernizing the ageing fleet of hardware and software currently deployed on industrial automation floors using a virtualized fog platform.
This technology, it is claimed, will enable consolidation, central management, upgraded security, high availability, and thereby improve overall operational efficiency.
Furthermore, this collaboration extends Toshiba’s Spinex IoT architecture with fog infrastructure used for computing nodes and IoT gateways supporting industrial machines.
The objective is to enable comprehensive asset and life cycle management of these systems integrated with the ability to provide advanced data analytics and machine learning.
Nebbiolo will augment Toshiba’s IoT software platform capabilities to achieve the aforementioned objectives. Toshiba will develop and integrate complete industrial IoT solutions with connectivity, security, data accumulation, visualization, and management leveraging Nebbiolo’s fog computing platform.
Toshiba is offering its Spinex IoT architecture to help customers accelerate digital transformation and improve business efficiency. It was developed leveraging Toshiba Group’s extensive industrial knowledge and expertise applied across various sectors from semiconductor to industrial and social infrastructure systems, consisting of major building blocks: data connection platform (“Meister DigitalTwin”), edge computing and analytics AI service (“SATLYS”).
As Toshiba is required to turn massive volumes of data generated at its worksites into actionable intelligence right at the edge, Toshiba recognizes the crucial role of edge computing and has focused on developing and improving this technology using Nebbiolo’s fog computing platform.
Nebbiolo’s fog computing platform, based on fogNodes, offered by Nebbiolo or by third parties, powered by the highly functional fogOS stack and centrally managed by the fogSM system manager, addresses many of the current industrial automation challenges.
It virtualizes and converges hardware and software components; and it provides centralized software life cycle management for distributed applications at the edge. It supports application-defined networking for OT/OT and OT/IT separation and Time-Sensitive Networking for real-time workloads, distributed security, software SDK/APIs, IT-like data management, and opens the path to the future of industrial control.
A fog-based architecture makes it possible to implement a modern industrial infrastructure progressively, with minimal disruption, and as a beneficial complement to today’s deployed systems.
“This partnership contributes to the development of IoT solutions in the industrial world.” said Hironobu Nishikori, President and CEO of Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation.
“Although industrial customers want to utilize IoT solutions for their business, their concerns, such as security risks and the ROI issue keep investment away. Toshiba provide firm and secure IoT offerings to our industrial customers with advanced fog computing infrastructure by Nebbiolo.”
“We are pleased to have Toshiba Digital Solutions, an early proponent of new architectures at the edge, as a strategic partner of our fog infrastructure for industrial IoT,” said Nebbiolo CEO Flavio Bonomi. “Their strategy to deliver innovative technology paired with outstanding customer support and systems integration is very important for our customers and allows us to accelerate the development and deployment of hyper-converged infrastructure for industrial IoT edge applications.
“Hyper-convergence of compute, storage, security, machine learning, and field-buses is essential to achieve the desired customer outcomes with deep integration of OT and IT. We look forward to working closely with Toshiba as we expand our presence in Japan and throughout the world to drive the industrial future.”
