Whitepapers

Few industries have the potential to cause such catastrophic effects on human life and the environment as the oil industry. Even with tight regulations and controls in place, technical and mechanical faults inevitably arise in the highly specialised equipment from time to time, and the ability to identify and diagnose these is absolutely crucial in terms of averting possible disaster. It was against this background that the skills and resources of Webtec Products Ltd and Hyco Ltd, a small hydraulic engineering company based in Beccles, Suffolk, were combined to provide a cost-effective and speedy diagnosis for one of the world?s largest oil companies.

As a forward-thinking company which wanted to remain at the cutting edge of modern technology, East Anglia-based GM Hydraulics found itself at the end of 2008 in the market for an upgrade to its existing C1000 hydraulic data acquisition system.  What the company needed was a system which was simple to operate, tailored to meets its specific input and which would provide the ultimate in professional reporting, so inspiring greater customer confidence and further promoting its already excellent reputation. Turning to its original supplier, the company found its perfect solution in the C2000 system, designed, developed and installed in March 2009 by Webtec Products Limited.

When CNH (Case New Holland) Global, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of agricultural and construction equipment, found itself in need of a truly global solution in terms of diagnostic testing equipment, it was to Webtec Products Limited that they turned in March 2009. Having worked on a design solution with Webtec previously, CNH already knew that the company had existing products which were being used worldwide and that they were well-placed to meet the requirements of both CNH and its massive global network of 11,300 dealers and distributors in 160 countries.

ALTEC, founded in 1989 and located in Morlhon-le-haut near Villefranche-de-Rouergue in the south west of France, designs, manufactures and distributes a wide and impressive range of agricultural implements. These are designed to simplify the handling processes used in the breeding industry for sheep, cattle, horses and goats.

Secure Boot is a form of verified booting technology which ensures boot path validations. As defined in UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) specifications, this BIOS-based technology assures that the system firmware checks if the boot loader is signed with a cryptographic key contained in the database in the firmware. In other words, Secure Boot is a firmware-based boot path validation mechanism that contains cryptographic key and it will check if the boot loader is protected by the key. Only the ones with proper digital signature verification in the next-stage boot loaders, kernels or user space can access the system. This will prevent the execution of codes that are not signed with the cryptographic key programmed in the system firmware.

Many of today’s networking devices are built with LAN bypass function to prevent failed LAN transmission from impeding important in-flow critical data. The function is to ensure fault-tolerance for network appliances so that essential communications can be still continued even when software, hardware or power failure occurs. The basic idea of bypass is “cross-connection”. When an Ethernet port fails, the dysfunctional port will be temporarily disconnected from the system interface and all the in-line data will flow into the other LAN port so that data is still received.

The launch of Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3 series platform indicates that IT management is heading into a new generation of processing capabilities. The new Intel® Xeon® server-based platform presents a great leap in CPU performance, RAM efficiency, PCH connectivity, and networking modules to deliver unprecedentedly low latency, high bandwidth and relatively lower power consumption. By integrating Intel® Xeon® v3 processors, DDR4 memory, the most up-to-date Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (Intel® QPI) , Intel® Virtualization (Intel® VT) technologies, and the unparalleled networking Intel® Ethernet XL710 family (codenamed Fortville), the Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3-based server platform (codenamed Grantley) is architected to address today’s data center challenges.

With the exponential growth of mobile Internet devices and the rise of cloud computing, end users demand faster, more powerful, and more secure Internet services. This unprecedented demand has presented a new challenge which Internet service provider and IT system operators maintain and manage their network traffic, especially in virtualized environments. To ensure smooth network traffic, a thoroughly enhanced architecture is necessary in order to deliver qualifying services and handle various types of data packets and security instructions. In other words, service providers require higher performance, power efficiency, scalability, and reliability for their virtualization and security management needs.

Enterprise and industrial network management have been undergoing from a hardware-concentrated approach to a more agile, flexible and consolidating solution for the rapid growing challenges in ownership cost due to the rising workload by cloud computing and information security. Traditionally, companies invested large amount of capital in discrete, physical machines to meet the workload demand, but nowadays, with the unprecedented growth in the amount of network traffic, it is more practical to rely on software approaches to balance workload and cost, while improving packet processing performance on a single platform. This is made possible by Intel DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit), as long as the platforms are built with Intel processors.

THE PROBLEM

Traditionally, the automotive supplier industry has been one of the most important branches for using compact robots, which are being employed in the manufacturing of various components. One of the companies in this area relying on DENSO robots is Renger Kunststoffspritzteile GmbH & CO. KG in Inzigkofen north of the Lake Constance in the Southwest of Germany. The company primarily manufactures plastic components in injection-moulding technology for the automotive industry. In this case study, we are looking at their production of cases for airbag control units, undoubtedly one of the most safety-related components in cars.