New Wind River Software Platform Designed to Battle Infrastructure Obsolescence with the IIoT

In this News Brief, Wind River introduces advancement to the Industrial IoT (IIoT) with a new software virtualization platform for cloud infrastructure.

Wind River Titanium Control

Wind River Titanium Control provides a way for companies to update aging infrastructure, particularly control systems formally unable to connect to the IoT. This advancement is a solution to the growing concern of updating critical pieces of infrastructure that were originally built before IoT connectivity was crucial to data gathering and security.
Titanium Control is a platform based on open standards, making it commercially deployable. It runs alongside existing infrastructure with on-premise cloud virtualizing physical subsystems.
Based on open source components, users add the real-time virtualization performance enhancements and are able to run the program through any OS. This allows for the aggregation of multiple control loops and data sets, extending the control loop beyond the physical devices on the factory floor.

Image courtesy of Wind River.

Titanium Control also has the ability to create in-built IoT processes for new businesses. As Gareth Noyes, CSO of Wind River explained, “We want to drive modern and young IT thinking to this environment. The decades-old control systems today take work to learn and lack the ability to be updated. [Titanium Control] modernizes [the process] and will create options for people to build new businesses, and create a healthier supply chain."

IoT Security

With IoT Cloud innovations, security is always a top concern. Security involves multi-level access identification. "If I think about the critical infrastructure, there's often an assumption that because systems are isolated or 'air-gapped' they're ok. Isolation is not a sufficient barrier for security. What we've implemented is a more modern hardware-based security system with TNS and key pairing. We've adopted IT-like security in control systems," said Noyes.

Key Features

• Open source software for cloud and virtualization, including Linux, real-time Kernel-based Virtual Machine, and OpenStack
• Accelerated vSwitch and inter-VM communication, and virtual infrastructure management
• Secure boot and Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA)
• Scalability from two to over 100 compute nodes
• Hitless software updates and patching without interruption to services or applications

The Titanium Control is part of the Wind River Titanium Control portfolio. Optimized for Intel Xeon processors, it is pre-validated on hardware from providers of Intel-based servers.


Cover image courtesy of Olafpictures.