These capabilities will enable users to manage critical information technology (IT) and operation technology (OT) infrastructure to flexibly deploy, monitor and manage multiple connected mission critical systems. Use cases include factories, drones, energy infrastructure, planes, autonomous vehicles and secure infrastructure.
Lynx’s management model supports IT and OT flexibility enabling operators to manage devices via on-premise, cloud or hybrid environments. This model gives companies the ability to combine embedded and edge, bringing safety, security and real-time capabilities to edge management frameworks. Operators will be able to combine different management models on the same node.
As an example, a cloud managed workload, real-time control and local analytics can all run on the same system. As well as providing flexibility to operators, this new set of capabilities enables the creation of “systems of systems” mission critical infrastructure where critical air-gapping and data protection is implemented on each node. This separation is used to isolate and detach IT assets from OT assets, meaning OT and IT and cloud services can be used across a facility without affecting existing infrastructure.
“With the new LYNX MOSA.ic management capabilities, we’re effectively giving the mission critical operator complete control and flexibility over their systems,” said Pavan Singh, vice president of product management at Lynx Software Technologies. “Now every heterogeneous end user device or a compute node in a pipeline, a factory or a refinery can be treated as a collective set of isolated nodes with OT, IT and security workloads, managed from a diverse set of infrastructure options that avoid vendor lock-in.”
LYNX MOSA.ic is a framework that enables Lynx to combine its technologies with a growing ecosystem of technologies and tools from partners and the open source world. These updates will enhance capabilities across the multiple industries Lynx supports: LYNX MOSA.ic for Avionics, LYNX MOSA.ic for Industrial and LynxSafe for enterprise IT environments.
Two new elements have been added to management libraries that run on top of LynxSecure:
- Lynx Node Manager (LNM): Residing on the device (such as a gateway, a server blade or a drone), LNM includes management APIs, a Lynx Messaging Service and Elastic Compute. The capabilities enable a management controller to monitor, update and perform operation tasks on the system. This allows each mission critical node to be deployed, monitored and updated securely and safely without compromising the availability and performance
- Lynx Management Center (LMC); Running either in the cloud or on-premise, LMC works with the Lynx Nodes to give the operator the system of systems view of their infrastructure. The technology can be, optionally, integrated with cloud-based management frameworks such as the Azure device twin. In addition, the combination of LMC and LNM is a great starting point for companies that prefer to leverage or develop their own management controller.
“Adoption of virtualization and containerization is rapidly gaining steam at the mission critical edge,” said Chris Rommel, EVP at VDC Research. “Providing manageability and the separation kernel properties of workload isolation, security and hardware allocation will drive confidence in the industrial and critical infrastructure operators and ultimately accelerate digital transformation.”
