Driving Smart Manufacturing

In the current era of digital transformation, enterprises and factories are increasingly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to drive modernization, innovation, competitiveness, and excellence in productivity and efficiency. However, challenges such as diverse infrastructure types, lack of infrastructure flexibility and its complexity, as well as the slow pace of integrating existing technologies into business processes and applications, can make adopting AI solutions a daunting task for many companies.

The Infortrend Enterprise Cloud (IEC) is a hyper-converged private cloud platform that integrates AI computing, storage, and software applications into a single solution. This allows customers to deploy enterprise applications on the modern, innovative, rapid, secure, and cost-saving platform featuring high performance, high reliability, high scalability, and centralized management.

The IEC platform integrates hardware, firmware, and software into an all-in-one, cloud-native cluster, simplifying infrastructure resource provisioning and application deployment. It reduces AI adoption costs, minimizes time and human effort, and enables enterprises to respond quickly to technical requirements and business challenges.

Rapid and Cost-Saving Solution for Application Deployment and Migration

The IEC platform is always in a ready-to-deploy state, allowing customers to launch enterprise open-source software applications at the earliest stage of new business demands or migrate existing applications from virtual machines (VMs) to containers. This helps address concerns related to long-term application deployment, high software licensing costs, and the complexity of managing operations across various infrastructure devices.

Seamless Enterprise System Integration

Enterprise applications require diverse computing and storage resources, along with varying hardware and software architectures. These complexities often lead to significant management and operational overhead. The IEC platform centralizes the management of all enterprise hardware and software systems, enabling seamless integration and connectivity across various enterprise applications, whether in containerized or VM environments. This approach reduces the need for additional integration efforts typically required in traditional system setups, streamlining operations and improving efficiency.

Integrity and Reliability for System Operations

The IEC platform includes built-in features such as automatic workload recovery and data replication, ensuring continuous system operation and keeping data secure and accessible over time. This secures zero system downtime and no data loss, ensuring that enterprise applications remain reliable and operational at all times.

Flexibility and Scalability for Business Growth

To maximize the return on investment (ROI) in enterprise infrastructure, the IEC platform can begin with a single-node deployment during the initial stages of adoption. It supports the deployment of various enterprise applications to address the needs of multiple functions within the organization. As the business grows, the IEC platform can seamlessly scale by adding up to 20 nodes, accommodating increasing computing and storage demands without any system downtime.

Data Privacy and Compliance

The IEC platform operates as a private cloud cluster within the customer's on-premises environment, directly integrating with the existing IT infrastructure, such as network and authentication services. All enterprise applications and customer data are stored within the customer's owned data center, ensuring that both system security and data sovereignty requirements are met. IEC addresses the needs of complying with data privacy and regulations such as Cybersecurity Law and GDPR.

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 feature a 2U chassis and support 25GbE and 100GbE network interfaces.

• KS 5008U for GPU-intensive tasks: Supports up to 4 high-performance Nvidia GPU cards and 8 SSDs. This model is ideal for AI deep learning and high-performance computing workloads.
• 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.

Explore Infortrend Enterprise Cloud (IEC)

Get the Datasheet

The IEC platform is a pre-configured hardware and software solution designed to provide powerful AI computing, storage for business data, and enterprise applications for customers of all sizes, from startups and SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) to VLEs (Very Large Enterprises). By simplifying the deployment of enterprise applications, the IEC platform accelerates the AI adoption journey, enabling organizations to achieve their goals of innovation, efficiency, and productivity.

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 an AI server, delivering CPU and GPU computing power for AI training and product manufacturing defect detection. EonStor GS 4090 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 AI-related packages.
• High Availability and Reliability: KS 5016U provides application system redundancy and failover capabilities, ensuring continuous operation without interruptions to product inspection tasks.
• Scalable and High-Performance Storage: EonStor GS 4090 G3 delivers high performance for AI-related data processing and offers nearly 2PB of storage capacity for captured data. It also includes built-in data protection features, ensuring data security and integrity.

AI-Driven Supply Chain Optimization

Manufacturing companies rely on applications such as MES, ERP, Shop Floor, and CRM to manage the manufacturing and delivery processes. These include order placement, material planning, production quality control, finished goods management, and shipping. Ensuring factory productivity and efficiency is essential for timely production and delivery. To prevent delays and disruptions, physical materials must be available at each stage of the production pipeline, as shortages of materials or parts can impact the entire supply chain.

AI-powered factories can implement the IEC model, KS 5016U, and EonStor GS SAS HDD unified storage to run manufacturing systems integrated with AI models. These AI models retrieve material inventory data from ERP and real-time production data from MES and Shop Floor systems. By analyzing this data, the AI generates predictive warnings for potential material shortages at every stage of production, helping prevent delays and ensuring smooth operations.

Solution Advantages

• Built-in Enterprise Software: KS 5016U comes with pre-installed enterprise software applications, simplifying deployment for order and inventory management (Odoo) and IoT applications (ThingsBoard). This enables factories to quickly set up a system environment with minimal barriers.
• Support for Traditional Applications: KS 5016U supports running traditional applications on VMs, allowing legacy MES or Shop Floor applications to be integrated and run on the same platform.
• Comprehensive Data Application Support: KS 5016U supports a wide range of data applications for data transfer (RabbitMQ, Kafka) and data management (ElasticSearch, Dremio, MinIO, Grafana), ensuring all stored data can be leveraged for AI model training and usage.
• High-Speed Data Processing and Storage: KS 5016U is equipped with 16 NVMe SSDs for fast data processing, while replicated data is backed up and stored in GS unified storage using SAS HDDs, ensuring reliable and seamless data operations.

Automated Anomaly Detection in Manufacturing

Manufacturing factories rely on equipment and sensor devices to manage and monitor production status in real time, ensuring production line health and quality. Any abnormal equipment or device behavior—such as unusual equipment states, excessive sensor activity, sudden temperature spikes, excessive signal generation, or delays in parts movement—can lead to production delays or even shutdowns.

To address this, factories can implement the IEC model, KS 5016U, and EonStor GS SAS HDD unified storage to deploy or migrate factory-related systems. By retrieving real-time signals and data from equipment and devices, factories can train AI models using data stored in EonStor GS. The AI model in KS 5016U then analyzes factory IoT data and generates alerts for detected anomalies, enabling proactive issue identification and minimizing production disruptions.

Solution Advantages

• Comprehensive IoT Support: KS 5016U includes IoT (ThingsBoard) and streaming (RabbitMQ, Kafka) software applications to capture data from factory equipment and devices. AI models are used to investigate and identify abnormal data patterns, with scalability to support expanding production workshops and increasing the number of devices and AI models.
• Seamless Integration with Traditional Applications: The platform supports traditional applications running on VMs, allowing legacy equipment and device applications to run on the same platform and integrate with AI applications.
• Big Data and AI Model Support: KS 5016U supports big data applications for IoT data storage and analysis, enabling AI model training, tuning, and use for improved decision-making and operations.
• Real-Time Data Processing: KS 5016U is equipped with 24 NVMe SSDs for high-speed data processing and storage, along with data replication and integrity capabilities, ensuring seamless, reliable data loading and landing.