I don’t watch too much TV, but I did take some time this weekend between my honey-do’s and soccer transport tasks to keep up with bay area football – it was a good weekend for that. As expected, there were plenty of car ads. I was struck by how the high-end auto manufacturers are really focusing on “intelligent” cars – competing in fact. Cars are now aware of their surroundings (obstacle sensing), aware of their driver (attention assist), able to call emergency assistance, making lots of decisions every second and richly communicating with its driver … or maybe more appropriately stated “passenger”:
These are really smart cars, and they are getting smarter. It is foreseeable now to imagine automated driving making the driver a true passenger. Read More »
I often engage in discussions with IT Directors, CIO’s, BioMed and CE teams at healthcare organizations worldwide. When the topic of medical device connectivity arises, it’s the point in the conversation where it gets – ah interesting. Points of view between the IT and Biomedical sides of the house are – sometimes aligned, but often there are gaps in the expected roles and responsibilities.
So rewind the clock a bit… back to the early 90’s when IBM had a foothold on its proprietary protocol known (and loved) as Systems Network Architecture commonly known as SNA. The two sides of the house back then were the mainframe group and the PC networking teams that were quickly emerging. The thought of providing end user connectivity to the big iron over something called Thinnet was very controversial in many big blue shops. I often thought that perhaps Thinnet was suffering from a market naming perception problem – but none the less at the time it was thought of as an inadequate transport technology to provide green screen access to the datacenter Big Iron (Yes — I said Green Screen). The general feeling was that the sky fall, on-call pagers would endlessly go off and the availability and performance reports would inevitably point the fingers of blame to the mainframe – something that was simply not allowed to happen!
Forwarding the clock a bit – say mid to late 90’s – the next and potentially the most important wave to date of convergence arrived – Voice. The thought of putting voice traffic on an IP network was believed by many at the time as just crazy. Again, falling skys and lots of dropped and unintelligible calls would result – the networks HAD to be separate. It was the way it was… but slowly over time, voice along with its cousin IBM SNA (both sharing the same sir name of “critical” btw) were riding the same converged network and living happily together. Read More »
From joint reference architectures to education webcasts, the collaboration between Cisco and Rockwell Automation benefits manufacturers. The partnership has empowered corporations globally and now industry experts from both companies are ready to share their best practices and lessons learned.
Thursday, April 28
9:00 a.m. PST / 10:00 a.m. MST / 11:00 a.m. CST / 12:00 p.m. EST
Growing demands for greater information access accelerate the convergence of manufacturing and enterprise networks and help manufacturers make better business decisions. As critical control systems link to company-wide infrastructures and beyond, new risks emerge that can affect productivity, operational efficiency and functional safety. To ensure the benefits derived from plantwide convergence outweigh risks and threats, it is imperative to follow contemporary architecture design practices that can enhance network resiliency and help protect key assets and information.
Learn From Industry Experts
Speakers Scott Johnston, Principal Consultant for Network & Security Services, Rockwell Automation and Bryce Barnes, Enterprise Vertical Solutions Architect for Manufacturing, Cisco, will discuss the solutions from Rockwell Automation and Cisco to address the challenges of network convergence. Learn the fundamentals and best practices for:
Securing manufacturing computing and controller assets
The value a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) brings to your manufacturing framework
How FactoryTalk Services and Applications such as FactoryTalk ViewPoint and FactoryTalk
Transaction Manager can be deployed within the manufacturing framework to leverage the DMZ
Yet another way for your business to become even more agile: That’s the promise of new updates to Cisco’s Data Center and Virtualization architectures. Today we’re announcing new innovations for virtualized and secure cloud-ready environments that deliver on Cisco’s architectural flexibility, investment protection, and operational simplicity in a secure and scalable manner.
So what’s new? Well, for starters, we’ll have wire-once, end-to-end data center convergence from server to storage array with director class, multihop FCoE for the Nexus 7000 and MDS 9500 platforms. We’ll also offer converged Data Center Management with Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) for single pane of glass visibility across LAN & SAN.
We will also offer you the ability to build a secure, cloud-ready fabric infrastructure, with LISP and MPLS on the Nexus 7000, ES-40 module on the Catalyst 6500, ACE-30 with Cloudburst (dynamic workload scaling) functionality leveraging OTV, a new Firewall Service Module (FWSM) on the Catalyst 6500, and DCNM APIs for Cloud orchestration.
What’s in it for partners? Here’s the scoop.Read More »
Although not a rule, IT and Control at many manufacturers have an arms-length, if not more distant, relationship. They have different priorities, expertise and cultures. But the reality is that the converged plant, based upon standard networking throughout the plant, requires them to work together to achieve the bucket of gold benefits awaiting their company. Our partnership with Rockwell Automation in many ways is a result of this need at many of our customers. They need us to work closer so that they can focus on a single technology and solution and rely on a “converged” support model as they bring their plants into the standard networking world interconnected to the rest of the enterprise. To this end our companies have been working together for more than five years.
Gregory Wilcox, Rockwell Automation, on IT/Control cultural convergence
Listen to my colleague at Rockwell Automation, Gregory Wilcox -- Business Development Manager, describe the culture convergence that needs to occur -- critical to the overall convergence. We have done a lot of the leg work to make this convergence happen.
