Home > Edge > Manufacturing Edge > White Papers > Dell APEX Private Cloud for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus - White Paper > Deployment considerations
To deploy the DVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus solution, understand and consider the following areas. For a detailed review of how the solution addresses these areas, review the DVD for Manufacturing Edge - Design Guide with Litmus.
Regarding solution sizing, the manufacturer must understand the layout and assets that make up their environments. The solution is designed to connect to these assets, so understanding the following is critical:
Building a reference point or chart around the number of industrial assets and tags that are related to these assets is a recommended starting point. The DVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus solution is sized for easy scaling and deployment based on the number of tags that are required, as the following table shows:
Workload size | >5,000 tags | >15,000 tags | >30,000 tags |
Dell APEX Private Cloud | 16 Cores per Node | 32 Cores per Node | 32 Cores per Node |
Dell Streaming Data Platform | |||
Litmus Edge software: Foundation, Growth, or Scale | |||
VMware vSAN or VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus or ESXi |
In the context of high availability, the solution can be deployed out-of-the-box on the Dell APEX Private Cloud. This means that the virtualized components, such as Litmus Edge and Edge Manager, can failover to another node if there is a hardware failure within the HCI cluster. More features such as VMware DRS can be leveraged to ensure optimal performance across all the Dell APEX Private Cloud nodes.
Some key considerations related to high availability for the solution include:
Disaster recovery is a key consideration when deploying edge infrastructure. It must be fully understood whether the edge applications are required to stay running in the event of a disaster, for example, a flooded data center. Manufacturers should consider the following:
Within the solution, the Dell Streaming Data Platform provides data persistence capability at the edge. When deploying the solution, consider the following:
Within the solution, data is cached under InfluxDB on Litmus Edge before relevant analytical use cases run on that data. Data is then sent to persist on the SDP platform longer-term.
Security is a critical consideration for any edge deployment, particularly as the interface point between industrial systems on the manufacturing floor and IT infrastructure and applications.
The DVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus is designed to leverage and extend existing IT security capabilities into manufacturing. Some key considerations from a security perspective include:
Applications can run directly on Litmus Edge if they can run within a Docker container.
Since the DVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus is a horizontal solution, manufacturers should consider the size of other applications and workloads running on the infrastructure (at the vSphere level on VxRail or PowerEdge). If additional applications must run on the manufacturing edge, consider sizing and architecture. The solution can scale easily once sized correctly.
The DVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus requires licensing for the following solutions:
The DVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus has an integrated integration capability to connect to public cloud platforms and on-premises applications and private cloud solutions. Prior to deployment, consider the following:
Understanding how the manufacturing process works prior to deployment of the solution is critical. A full assessment of manufacturing operations is recommended, and here are some important considerations to evaluate:
Assessment is recommended to identify the best approach for edge solutions architecture and to identify the business outcomes and use cases that offer the most improvement to manufacturing outcomes.