What's Next for the Industrial Edge: Codesys Collabs with Red Hat and Intel

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, readers. (That may not be a real thing holiday-wise, but let’s just roll with it.)

It wasn’t terribly long ago – more specifically, the end of September – that we covered software company Red Hat’s new industrial edge platform. With collaboration from Intel, the platform has set out to “enable many industrial control system (ICS) vendors and system integrators (SIs) to automate previously manual industrial automation tasks.” This allows organizations to benefit from an open edge platform that a.) isn’t hampered by the limitations of legacy industrial controls and archaic organizational structures, and b.) will simplify integration of smart components in one easy-to-use, reliable solution – one that spans from real-time shop floor control and the use of AI/ML to full IT manageability. (More open edge platform-centric details can be found here.)

Now, we’ve got follow-up to these developments:

Codesys, a provider of automation software for engineering control systems, has officially joined in on the fun.

(And by “the fun,” we mean this Red Hat-Intel collab, where Codesys will contribute to the virtualization and containerization of industrial controls.)

With the addition of Codesys Virtual Control SL, modern systems can be transformed into industrial controllers – from small, dedicated devices to large IT farms, completely independent of hardware substructures. Now, the Red Hat + Intel platform is able to, according to the company’s experts, “achieve deterministic performance requirements between two or more systems across the network using existing features in RHEL, such as real-time kernel and accelerated packet processing (DPDK), to meet the requirements of safety-critical controls and target the industrial automation space.”

The long-story-short of it? Reduced risks and operational complexities, as well as lower costs associated with the engineering, deployment, and management of open automation solutions at scale.

And at this point, anything that smartly and comprehensively benefits the development of future-forward, software-defined factories points towards a win.