A Factory Floor IT Infrastructure, and the software workloads it delivers, plays a vital role in maintaining and maximizing production and efficiency in a manufacturing facility. With this tight coupling to production, and the need to be highly responsive, much of the burden to maintain these systems lies in the hands of operational technology (OT) personnel and automation engineers. Unique characteristics, which differ from that of traditional line-of-business (LOB) IT systems, help create support gaps – which in-turn drives the need for a high level of self-reliance.
Ongoing manufacturing process improvements, with involvement of a multitude of automation/OEM suppliers - introducing new IT related needs - only adds to the difficulties.
All of this combines to create significant challenges for OT and automation personnel – dictating the need to deal with:
- Outdated unsupported software and operating systems
- A menagerie of obsolete servers and storage solutions
- Inadequate workload high availability (HA)
- Atypical system integration and connectivity considerations
- Challenging workload delivery and consumption requirements
- Diverse collection of computers to manage including servers, workstations, laptops, touch panels, and thin clients
- Wide ranging production user community needs – i.e., high privileged users to users with limited kiosk like functionality
- Unique security concerns presented by a diverse user community
- Lack of an Active Directory (AD) Domain or proper AD management/monitoring tools
- Over/under provisioning concerns
- Lengthy procurement and provisioning times
- Dismal agility/scalability to help drive innovation
- Improper Backup and DR infrastructure and procedures in place
- Insufficient access to responsive support with combined IT/OT expertise
"Think about it – your workloads and applications, such as HMI and reporting software, Historians, and Database engines, are useless if you can’t keep your infrastructure securely running in a manageable cost-effective way!"A modern IT Infrastructure – which is comprised of next-generation technology such as new high-performance server/storage designs, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), virtualization, containerization, AI, and hybrid-cloud – provides the key components to address the challenges associated with a Factory Floor IT infrastructure.
PT has decades of demonstrated success delivering Factory Floor IT Infrastructure solutions. We know how to address the unique challenges presented to production support personnel in this regard. Our solutions are based on modern IT infrastructure approaches that leverage the best technology to properly address your needs.
Recognizing the value of lean manufacturing,
our goal is always to provide designs that empower OT and automation personnel with a high level of management and monitoring self-reliance – while providing a significant degree of freedom to quickly address future automation improvement/innovation needs.
Partnering with PT for your modern IT infrastructure needs provides you a single competitive source for services,
hardware, and
software. But the real value PT offers comes from shorter project life-cycles, with solutions that effortlessly perform their intended function – and work right the first time!
PT Key Factory Floor IT Services (Design and Implementation):
- Compute/storage infrastructure – including large scale HCI and Private Cloud solutions
- Hybrid Cloud Migration
- Backup and Disaster Recovery
- Workload Distribution
- Virtualization Strategy
- Remote Desktop Services (RDS) / Thin Client Infrastructure
- Modern Secure VPN-less Remote Access
- Backend Systems Integration
- Active Directory (Factory Floor/Process Domain)/Group Policy
- Infrastructure Management & Monitoring
- Assume Breach Security Posture
- Update Management