Driving Smart Manufacturing

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, forward-thinking enterprises and factories are harnessing cutting-edge technologies to revolutionize operations, spark innovation, boost competitiveness, and unlock new levels of productivity. Yet, many organizations encounter obstacles such as diverse infrastructure setups, limited flexibility, and complex IT management. Slow integration of existing systems into core business processes can also hinder the adoption of groundbreaking solutions.

That’s where Infortrend Enterprise Cloud (IEC) comes in. IEC is a powerful private cloud platform that consolidates computing, storage, and applications into a single solution. It enables enterprises to deploy applications on a modern, innovative, and cost-effective platform, offering exceptional performance, high reliability, seamless scalability, and centralized management to enhance operational efficiency.

The IEC platform integrates hardware and software into a comprehensive, cloud-native resource pool, simplifying infrastructure provisioning and application deployment. It reduces adoption costs for innovative technologies, minimizes the time and human effort, and enables enterprises to quickly respond to technical requirements and business challenges while delivering computing, storage, and application capabilities.

Quick Deployment of Smart Factory Application

The IEC platform is always ready for deploying innovative application systems, enabling enterprises to launch pre-packaged software solutions as soon as new business demands arise. It also facilitates seamless migration of existing applications from virtual machines (VMs) to containers, overcoming the delays and complexities associated with traditional deployment methods. This approach simplifies application rollouts, ensuring faster, more flexible, and efficient factory operations.

Centralized Enterprise System Management

Enterprise applications often require a wide range of computing and storage resources, along with diverse software tools and application architectures. This complexity can lead to substantial management and operational challenges. The IEC platform centralizes the management of enterprise hardware resources, application systems, and data, effectively reducing the operational burden of enterprise systems.

Reliability of System Operations

The IEC platform comes with built-in features such as node failover, automatic workload recovery, and data replication to ensure continuous system operation, keeping data accessible over time. This ensures zero system downtime and no data loss, keeping enterprise applications available and fully operational at all times.

Flexibility and Scalability for Business Growth

The IEC platform is built to scale with your business. Enterprises can deploy clusters and applications based on initial requirements, then seamlessly expand the platform by adding nodes as production lines or branches grow. This flexibility ensures that increasing computing and storage demands are met without any system downtime.

The IEC platform offers KS compute nodes, which come in three model types, featuring dual Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs or AMD EPYC^™ 9004 Series CPUs and configurable options for GPUs and U.2 NVMe SSDs, allowing enterprises to select the model that best fits their application needs. All KS models are designed in a 2U rack mount form and support 25GbE and 100GbE network interfaces.

• KS 5016U for various AI data services: Supports 2 Nvidia GPU cards and 16 SSDs, providing efficient performance suitable for AI inference.
• KS 5024U for storage-intensive tasks: Provides support for 24 SSDs, making it ideal for real-time data processing and landing.

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Automated Optical Inspection for Defect Detection

Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) is widely used in automated factories to ensure product quality. It typically consists of cameras that capture product images on the manufacturing line and industrial computers with pre-trained AI models to detect defects. These images and inspection data are stored in storage devices and utilized by AI servers to optimize the models. The optimized models are then deployed to industrial computers, enhancing inspection accuracy.

Factories can build an AOI environment using the IEC cloud platform model, such as KS 5016U, with EonStor GS unified storage. This setup functions as both an enterprise application and a smart factory server, delivering CPU and GPU computing power for product manufacturing defect detection. EonStor GS 4000 G3, a 90-bay SAS HDD unified storage, serves as a storage solution for large volumes of image data captured from the field.

Solution Advantages

• Machine Vision Software Support: KS 5016U supports popular machine vision software, including VM versions of MIL and Merlic. It also supports containerized applications, simplifying and streamlining the installation of manufacturing-related packages.
• High Availability and Reliability: KS 5016U provides application system redundancy and failover capabilities, ensuring continuous operation without interruptions to product inspection tasks.
• High-Performance and High-Capacity Storage: EonStor GS 4000 G3 delivers high performance for large data processing and offers nearly 2PB of storage capacity for captured data. It also includes built-in data protection features, ensuring data security.

Shop Floor to Shipping Forecasting

Manufacturing companies require precise coordination between shop floor operations and shipping to ensure timely order fulfillment. The integration of MES, ERP, Shop Floor, and CRM systems plays a crucial role in managing production workflows, material tracking, quality control, and delivery schedules. Any delay or inefficiency at the shop floor level can impact final shipping timelines, causing customer dissatisfaction and supply chain disruptions.

By leveraging data-driven forecasting, factories can implement the IEC model, KS 5016U, and EonStor GS SAS HDD unified storage to integrate shop floor data with shipping predictions. Factory applications continuously analyze real-time work-in-progress data from Shop Floor systems and order information from CRM and ERP platforms. This predictive approach enables factories to anticipate potential delays, optimize logistics planning, and improve overall supply chain efficiency.

Solution Advantages

• Built-in CRM and ERP Application Tools: KS 5016U provides a pre-packaged enterprise software marketplace with CRM and ERP tools, offering seamless integration of work orders and delivery schedules with real-time shop floor data. This enables accurate shipping forecasting based on production progress.
• Support for Traditional Shop Floor Applications: With its unique VM technology, KS 5016U supports legacy shop floor systems, allowing manufacturers to maintain existing applications while benefiting from innovation-driven optimizations.
• Real-time Data Collection and Processing: KS 5016U features high-performance computing and storage capabilities, along with advanced data streaming tools to collect real-time workstation data. This ensures continuous data flow for finished goods analysis and enhances decision-making in production and shipping logistics.

Automated Anomaly Detection in Manufacturing

Manufacturing factories rely on equipment and sensor devices to monitor production status in real time, ensuring production line efficiency and quality. Any abnormal equipment behavior, such as unusual operational states, excessive sensor activity, sudden temperature spikes, or delays in parts movement, can cause production slowdowns or even shutdowns.

To prevent these disruptions, factories can implement the IEC model, KS 5016U, and EonStor GS SAS HDD unified storage to deploy or migrate factory-related systems. By collecting real-time equipment data and storing it in EonStor GS, AI models running on KS 5016U can analyze factory IoT data, detect anomalies, and generate alerts. This proactive approach helps minimize downtime and improve operational efficiency.

Solution Advantages

• Comprehensive IoT Data Support: KS 5016U supports IoT platforms (ThingsBoard) and streaming services (RabbitMQ, Kafka) to capture and analyze real-time factory equipment and device data, enabling predictive maintenance and anomaly detection.
• Integration with Traditional Applications: The platform supports running legacy applications on VMs, allowing traditional factory equipment and monitoring systems to integrate seamlessly with AI-driven analytics.
• Real-Time Data Processing: Equipped with 16 NVMe SSDs, KS 5016U provides high-speed data processing, ensuring reliable real-time data loading and anomaly detection with minimal latency.