The IoT Edge Gateway - a New Class of Computing Device
I've been in the IT industry now for a long time. We used to have a joke back in 90's about having an SNMP toaster. If you don't get that joke - then this next subject may be a little overwhelming...
For the past 20 years+, various commercial and industrial equipment manufacturers had PCs integrated into their devices to run them. They used various forms of what are called "embedded OS" from various forms of Linux, Lynx, Windows, etc. These stripped down OS were designed to do one thing - run the app that runs the device.
In the early days these devices were often what I described as islands, you bought the tool or device whatever and never touched it. The vendor would supply any updates. These devices often at best had a serial port and were rarely on any kind of a modern network.
Then the devices started to be networked. First again via serial ports and often with proprietary protocols and then finally with Ethernet. But often those networks were isolated from the corporate network and were really used more for larger control and monitoring systems.
That has all changed. Today - practically all of these modern tools or devices - let's call them "things" are networked. They also collect all sorts of important data - not only about is everything working okay - but how fast, how many, to what specification, etc.
Add to that modern data analytic capabilities like Hadoop, StatSoft, etc, etc and business's of all sorts what to be able to collect that data and analyze it to make business decisions. Now scale it to in some cases remarkably large numbers and the Internet of Things or IoT was born.
You name the industry and there is some sort of IoT application. From Utilities, to Healthcare to Manufacturing and Supply Chain, Transportation. And it's growing like mad...
From an IT operational and security standpoint, these new devices and their flood of data raised a challenge. How do I segment these devices onto networks that allow the devices to perform well doing their primary job - but provide access into the corporate network or cloud services for that all important data. And oh by the way the device may be mobile or use a traditional serial style communication.
Enter a new compute device into the picture - the IoT Edge Gateway. I call the gateways a compute device simply because they do a lot more than just forward data packets from a "thing" onto a corporate network.
The latest versions of these are Intel Atom based computers that can run a number of differing OS from Intel WindRiver to Ubuntu Snappy to Windows 10 IoT edition.
On top of that these new devices have a very large number of communication interfaces on them when compared to a traditional compute device. Often that includes 802.11n WiFi, HSPA+ & LTE Cellular, USB 2.0 & 3.0, HDMI, GPIO and RS-232, 485/422 and so on. Even mesh style networking like Zigbee and ZWave are available.
The goal of these devices is to collect the data from one of more "Things" and then using apps running on a selected OS to filter, prepare then forward the data to whatever data collection point you might need to analytic processing - either SQL or Non-SQL.
But the cool part for an IT guy is that since an application running on the gateway is preparing the data it can also support all of the important things IT need to think about like credentials, security, firewalls, etc. Also since there is a regular OS running on the device it is entire possible that a single gateway could potentially run multiple apps to collect data from disparate things - assuming the gateway can support the workloads.
Additionally IT can manage the gateway in much the same way it does any other compute endpoint.
Bottom line is that in many companies if IoT is becoming a reality and these style of devices will become more and more common. If you haven't done some due diligence around these products yet - do so, some very interesting possibilities.
For the past 20 years+, various commercial and industrial equipment manufacturers had PCs integrated into their devices to run them. They used various forms of what are called "embedded OS" from various forms of Linux, Lynx, Windows, etc. These stripped down OS were designed to do one thing - run the app that runs the device.
In the early days these devices were often what I described as islands, you bought the tool or device whatever and never touched it. The vendor would supply any updates. These devices often at best had a serial port and were rarely on any kind of a modern network.
Then the devices started to be networked. First again via serial ports and often with proprietary protocols and then finally with Ethernet. But often those networks were isolated from the corporate network and were really used more for larger control and monitoring systems.
That has all changed. Today - practically all of these modern tools or devices - let's call them "things" are networked. They also collect all sorts of important data - not only about is everything working okay - but how fast, how many, to what specification, etc.
Add to that modern data analytic capabilities like Hadoop, StatSoft, etc, etc and business's of all sorts what to be able to collect that data and analyze it to make business decisions. Now scale it to in some cases remarkably large numbers and the Internet of Things or IoT was born.
You name the industry and there is some sort of IoT application. From Utilities, to Healthcare to Manufacturing and Supply Chain, Transportation. And it's growing like mad...
From an IT operational and security standpoint, these new devices and their flood of data raised a challenge. How do I segment these devices onto networks that allow the devices to perform well doing their primary job - but provide access into the corporate network or cloud services for that all important data. And oh by the way the device may be mobile or use a traditional serial style communication.
Enter a new compute device into the picture - the IoT Edge Gateway. I call the gateways a compute device simply because they do a lot more than just forward data packets from a "thing" onto a corporate network.
The latest versions of these are Intel Atom based computers that can run a number of differing OS from Intel WindRiver to Ubuntu Snappy to Windows 10 IoT edition.
On top of that these new devices have a very large number of communication interfaces on them when compared to a traditional compute device. Often that includes 802.11n WiFi, HSPA+ & LTE Cellular, USB 2.0 & 3.0, HDMI, GPIO and RS-232, 485/422 and so on. Even mesh style networking like Zigbee and ZWave are available.
The goal of these devices is to collect the data from one of more "Things" and then using apps running on a selected OS to filter, prepare then forward the data to whatever data collection point you might need to analytic processing - either SQL or Non-SQL.
But the cool part for an IT guy is that since an application running on the gateway is preparing the data it can also support all of the important things IT need to think about like credentials, security, firewalls, etc. Also since there is a regular OS running on the device it is entire possible that a single gateway could potentially run multiple apps to collect data from disparate things - assuming the gateway can support the workloads.
Additionally IT can manage the gateway in much the same way it does any other compute endpoint.
Bottom line is that in many companies if IoT is becoming a reality and these style of devices will become more and more common. If you haven't done some due diligence around these products yet - do so, some very interesting possibilities.
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