HighByte Blog
Read company updates and our technology viewpoints here.
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Read company updates and our technology viewpoints here.
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Elevate your industrial interoperability: A primer on data Pipelines in the Intelligence Hub3/8/2024
Time to read: 15 minutes In HighByte Intelligence Hub, the Pipelines feature was created to make modeled data consumable by a diverse range of applications and services. With the last few releases of the Intelligence Hub, Pipelines has undergone big changes to further that goal and more. From adding new functionality to refining the UX, Pipelines has swiftly evolved beyond its initial focus on “post-processing” payloads for advanced use cases. It has become a core data engineering capability to solve industrial interoperability problems within the Intelligence Hub. Time to read: 9 minutes In an earlier blog, “The power of payloads in your unified namespace,” I discussed the use of complex payloads combining multiple unified namespace (UNS) data streams to make the architecture more responsive to the diverse needs of consuming personas and systems. In this post, I want to show what these complex payloads might look like, how data models can enable a UNS architecture, and how easily HighByte Intelligence Hub can provide consuming systems with the necessary data—when and how it’s needed. Time to read: 8 minutes As industrial organizations across the globe work toward digital transformation, many find the lack of readily accessible and usable data to be major barriers to success. Manufacturers want to use operational data to drive automated decisions from machinery to the Cloud and put better information in the hands of business leaders. But depending on their data maturity, manufacturers often find that:
The result of these challenges is the inability to scale. Even projects that manage to get rolled out are difficult and expensive to maintain, and therefore digital transformation goals are not met. Time to read: 5 minutes If you’re moving industrial data to the cloud, you’re probably aware that AWS offers a breadth of services to store, catalog, analyze, and share operational information. Cloud services have become a key enabling tool in digital transformation because of their ability to store, process, and analyze large amounts of data in a centralized location. HighByte recently joined the AWS Partner Network to help manufacturers contextualize and deliver data from their connected systems to the cloud with seamless efficiency. As stated by Sandrine Périno, Manufacturing and Industrial Global Partner Lead at AWS, “The Intelligence Hub delivers a modern approach to integrating factory floor systems with AWS cloud services. HighByte complements our edge strategy and aligns with our mission to optimize operations for Industrials by providing highly contextualized data ready for analysis.” Manufacturers use cloud services differently depending on their specific needs, so we wanted to highlight the four primary ways our customers are connecting the Intelligence Hub to AWS. They include: Time to read: 8 minutes How much time do you spend cleaning data? If your factory is like most connected operations, you probably have tons of raw data streaming from connected devices to existing enterprise systems, bespoke databases, and a cloud data lake. This architecture often leads to inconsistent or even unusable data for several reasons. We know the Cloud is a key tool for digital transformation. It provides the scalability and storage capacity you need to collect and interpret vast amounts of data coming from the operations level. However, by nature, cloud platforms are IT-focused tools. They structure data differently than operational systems, which means IT must spend a lot of time cleaning the data before it can be used. And if the data moves directly to different enterprise systems, multiple teams across the organization will clean the data independently, leading to different versions of the truth.
Time to read: 6 minutes
Let’s talk about getting OPC data into Microsoft Azure. When you search this phrase in Google, 90% of results provide this use case: streaming sensor data to the Cloud.
If your Industry 4.0 solution is streaming sensor data to the Cloud, you're doing it wrong. Now let me explain. On the factory floor, we have machines driven by PLCs, and we typically have an OPC server connected to those PLCs that feeds data into an HMI. OPC servers and HMIs work with tags, which are discrete streams of data. For example, one tag might be for pressure and another might represent the on and off state of the machine. When cloud technology like Microsoft Azure first entered the scene, vendors created IoT gateways to connect to the OPC server and send tag streams to the Cloud in a JSON format. It was the easiest thing to do, and once that connection was made, we thought we were done. |
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