Stratus Releases Updates to its ztC Edge Platform

Stratus Technologies unveiled new enhancements to its ztC Edge portfolio, which includes the ztC Edge 100i and ztC Edge 110i.  This update delivers an improved and more efficient deployment and provisioning experience to help organizations more quickly install the zero-touch Edge Computing platforms across multiple locations.  In addition, new manageability, security, and performance enhancements will help partners and customers to reduce their cost of operations and maintenance, minimize risk of data loss, and ensure higher availability for all business-critical operations.

The ztC Edge is designed to be a more secure, rugged, highly automated Edge Computing platform that helps organizations achieve greater performance though increased operational efficiency and zero downtime at the edge.  With its built-in virtualization, automated protection, and industrial interoperability, ztC Edge helps to ensure that customers can more quickly and easily achieve higher availability for their essential applications.

New additions to ztC Edge Platform include:

Improved Manageability

ztC Edge system settings and user preferences can now be stored more quickly and easily to a local drive or the Stratus Cloud. More simplified system backup and restoration will help companies to save time by automating certain processes and reducing user error.

Different templates can be created and archived for different use cases, workloads, or locations, helping to make commissioning systems more efficient and accurate. Organizations can use these templates to more rapidly provision single or multiple ztC Edge platforms from remote areas. This can be especially important for partners who implement and manage multiple platforms across multiple customers’ facilities and properties, making it easier for them to support systems and applications from one off-site location remotely.

The latest version of the ztC Edge is Microsoft Azure certified, with integration capabilities embedded in the platform for simpler systems management and faster time to value for customers.

Improved Security

The ztC Edge 110i update introduces a new and more secure cloud-based file repository, called the Stratus Cloud, for partners and customers to more safely transmit, store and retrieve their ztC Edge system preference templates. Versus some other third-party cloud offerings, Stratus Cloud automatically authenticates users and groups using the same credentials as their Stratus Customer Service Portal account, helping to save partners and customers time and effort.

Increased Performance

The ztC Edge 110i also comes with an expanded 64 GB memory capacity to support a broader range of memory-intensive industrial workloads, giving customers more choice and flexibility in consolidating multiple applications, such as SCADA, on one machine, which helps to save costs and increase agility.

ztC Edge 110i platforms are now Class I Division 2 certified, making them safer to deploy in hazardous locations. This certification allows ztC Edge to be implemented in a wider variety of industrial settings with more significant environmental variability.

The ztC Edge’s built-in virtualization makes applications more portable, while the computing platform also provides greater availability, resilience and data protection. A wide range of out-of-the-box capabilities help to improve the security of customers’ ztC Edge platforms, thus upgrading their security posture and mitigating risk. ztC Edge platforms also support common operational technology (OT) and IT protocols, tools, and standards, such as SNMP and OPC UA, which makes them easier to integrate into, and work with, existing environments, helping to save partners and customers time.

Craig Resnick, ARC Advisory Group, commented, “Organizations are under pressure to ensure applications at the edge and in the datacenter or cloud work in harmony to optimize peak business performance and enable more dynamic decision making.  Companies are quickly working to automate, modernize, and digitally transform their businesses for greater return on investment while protecting their current business operations investments.  To respond to these market demands, Stratus introduced new enhancements to its ztC Edge platform with functionality to directly address this critical Edge Computing to cloud strategy.  The Edge Computing capabilities of the ztC Edge platform are designed to provide remote application management, more rapid and efficient multi-site deployment, improved security, and high availability of critical business operations and applications.”