HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric helps manufacturers unify, process, and surface insights for better business decisions faster and at a lower total cost of ownership than traditional analytic solutions.
Manufacturing represents 16% of the worldโs GDPโapproximately $602.5B per year. Stated another way, every dollar spent by manufacturing translates into $2.68 for the U.S. economy. Thatโs a significant impact and helps to contextualize why this market has historically been slower than most to adopt advanced technologies like analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).
But in 2020, everything changed. World events and the pandemic exposed the fragile state of our supply chain. Remember hording toilet paper? Then thereโs a workforce that is retiring without replacements from younger generations. The result has been some serious business disruption and an industry that is on a growth spurt to adopt new technology. The manufacturing floor is โsmarterโ from robotics, IoT sensors, video, and neural networks that decide in 1 second if the production run meets the companyโs quality standards.
All these devices produce a lot of siloed data which means your business could miss a real-time event, like when a saw blade goes out of spec, resulting in higher costs from waste. Just like any industry, manufacturers want to get insights to make better business decisions and increase manufacturing productivity. And this is where things get messy.
Every industry today is facing the challenge of how to unify the plethora of data types being stored by their business. Manufacturers are especially vulnerable because they are a conglomerate of technologies ranging from 40-year old analog systems to graphic processing units (GPUs), video and neural networks. Getting access to all this data is time consuming and difficultโwhich means insights are slow and potentially stale.
All these customers are looking for a solution that simplifies access to legacy and modern data sources, preferably through a single management pane, then process it to reveal the value locked inside.
What all these industries need is a new approach to analytics. That exists today, and it is known as a data fabric.
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric
Data fabric technology has been around for a few years but only just recently have companies come to appreciate itsโ value. Watch this video to learn what a data fabric is.
Industry analyst Forrester defines a data fabric as:
"... focuses on automating data integration, transformation, preparation, curation, security, governance, and orchestration to enable analytics and insights quickly for business success." โ The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Fabric, Q2 2022
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric is a unique solution because it helps manufacturers (and any industry) unlock data value in real-time across their hybrid and multicloud environments. It does this by unifying files, objects, databases, real-time and batch streams into a hybrid data plane that spans across on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments. Once unified, a global namespace provides single access to the data allowing geo-distributed teams to access it as if it was on their โCโ drive. This enables data and business teams to access the freshest data available which enables better insights and business decisions.
Unifying data simplifies data management, security, high availability, data placement and tiering, all of which are built into HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric. By translating business and government regulations into automated policies, the data is secured, replicated, and keep in compliance with PII, locality and governance regulations within any human intervention. As needs change, these policies can be easily edited and updated.
Why is HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric unique? Because a single platform replaces 10-12 unique solutions that need to be installed, configured, secured, and managed. Many of these solutions require specialized skillsets that are expensive. But HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric replaces them with automated policies which means you can reduce infrastructure dedicated to each data type, reduce software licenses, reduce the number of specialized skillsets you need to employ as well as the infrastructure required for disaster recovery.
Thatโs because built-in replication ensures that multiple points of failure wonโt impact daily production. HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric automatically replicates streams to centralized sites like data centers or clouds. Letโs say you are streaming from an oil rig or cell tower. Using a global policy, this stream will be simultaneously replicated (up to six replicas) to any environment. Once there, data and business teams can immediately access the data from a centralized management console and begin their analysis.
What kind of manufacturing use cases can take advantage of HPE Ezmeral Data Fabricโs power? Here are just a few examples.
Autonomous vehicles
One of the most successful automobile companies in the world is working to make driving safer by building intelligent vehicles. The company believes that by developing autonomous technology, they can provide accident-free driving and enhance vehicle and road safety. They needed a data platform that could collect and manage massive amounts of small data files from test vehicles then enable data scientists from around the world to directly access the data.
After an extensive PoC, they commented that only HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric was able to collect two million real-life kilometers and 240 million virtual kilometers by ingesting greater than 3 petabytes per day; transfer 50 petabytes of data every week; and provide thousands of engineers, partners, and data scientists with direct access to all the data.
Smart manufacturing
The fourth-largest manufacturer of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) has been adopting AI for smart manufacturing and factory operations to optimize production quality, decrease costs, increase ops efficiency, and enhance business agility. Over a three year timeframe, they tried to adopt various AI technology platforms, but none were delivering results.
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric and other components of the HPE Ezmeral software portfolio enabled this vendor to provision GPU resources on-demand, leverage the unified management interface to reduce provisioning and complexity, have multiple applications and servers access GPUs, and experience faster time to market.
Bridging analog and digital worlds
This chemical company is chartered with providing a sustainable future by combining economic success with environmental and social responsibility. There are six segments to their organization: chemical, materials, industrial solutions, surface technologies, nutrition & care, and agricultural.
The initial use case for HPE was to automate their battery research lab then create a hybrid data lake that would be used by data scientists. Reaching these goals meant that the company needed a comprehensive data store that contained multiple data formats and types. It had to be accessible by workloads that shifted between on-premises and cloud environments which meant that a strong security model was critical.
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric was able to integrate the entire application environment, including SAP HANA operations. Their scientists were able to directly access data from on-premises, multiple cloud, and edge environments and the built-in security and data consistency models ensure that access, security, and data location complied with local and government regulations. The HPE-supported open source ecosystems simplified projects moving from development to production and industry standard API support enabled access to both legacy and new system data.
Todayโs smart manufacturing plants are creating data from diverse sources. You can continue to struggle with a traditional solution and multiple point products or get to know HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric better and see how real-time hybrid data analytics will help you leapfrog the competition with better insights and innovation.
Learn more at: https//: www.hpe.com/datafabric
Joann Starke
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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JoannStarke
Joann is an accomplished professional with a strong foundation in marketing and computer science. Her expertise spans the development and successful market introduction of AI, analytics, and cloud-based solutions. Currently, she serves as a subject matter expert for HPE Private Cloud AI. Joann holds a B.S. in both marketing and computer science.