The exponential growth of data generated in today’s modern smart manufacturing operations poses great opportunities for those businesses but also tremendous challenges in how to capture, store and safeguard that data. That market analysis comes in a new white paper from Tuxera, the leading provider of quality-assured data storage management software and networking technologies.
In the paper, “Data trends in the smart manufacturing industry and IIoT markets: Implications for the storage stack,” Tuxera examines the issues of modern real-time data workloads, the reliability of storage systems – including why they fail and the costs of failure – and the selection of optimal operating systems and hardware platforms in modern industrial and automation markets.
The deployment of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices, coupled with the use of traditional devices such as sensors, motion controllers, and programmable logic controllers, means that manufacturing businesses are awash in data.
“That data has great financial value, both for improving operational efficiency and for developing new business lines,” said the paper’s author, Tuxera Product Manager Eva Rio. “However, data is worthless unless it is reliable – partial data or corrupted data can be worse than no data at all – and can be stored securely and accessed as needed.”
Companies can use smart manufacturing data for cost-saving internal improvements, such as operational intelligence and predictive maintenance – or to create new external revenue streams. However, the data comes from a vast and diverse array of sources and needs to be stored and processed.
“This results in several significant challenges within the storage stack,” Rio writes, including:
- Continuous, write-heavy workloads
- Lifetime and flash wear issues
- Resource-constrained environments
- Real-time operations
- Fast recovery after shutdown
- Interoperability
- Fault tolerance
That means reliability is crucial for embedded devices in the smart manufacturing industry. Field failures and recalls cause downtime, with an estimated cost across all industries of $260,000 per hour, the Tuxera paper reports. Those failures also can cause critical data to be lost and damage the reputation of the company – costs that are immeasurable.
For those reasons, smart manufacturing companies must carefully consider their choices of storage media and flash management and file systems software. Hardware and software must work together to provide optimal environments for data, emphasizing system integrity to maximize device lifetime, minimizing memory wear-out issues and write amplification and reducing the need for wear leveling.
“Storage systems must be able to balance the need for fault tolerance and recovery with performance, write-heavy workloads, and interoperability needs,” Rio wrote.
