Article

8. February 2018

With a world premiere and well-filled order books for iesy, the international leading trade fair for embedded systems in Nuremberg came to an end. In particular, the launch of embedded mini-STX was of major public interest.

Several industry leading magazines, including Electronik and Markt&Technik, headlined iesy's mini-server in their trade show releases, highlighting the level of innovation and the particular suitability for Industry 4.0 and IoT applications of the new form-factor. „The demand for ultra-compact industrial-grade servers for the shop floor is immense,“ says Ansgar Hein, explaining the success of the new solution. „In addition, our embedded mini-STX is one of the most compact and powerful solutions based on COM Express Type 7 currently available,“ continues Hein. The technical details of the mini-server are impressive: at just 147 mm x 140 mm, there are a total of four 10 GbE connections with SFP + modules as well as processors of the Intel Xeon or Atom class and M.2 NVMe sockets for ultra-fast memory. Yet another plus is the baseboard management controller, which provides a unique selling point in this compact device class and provides specialized remote and virtualization features typically located in data center servers. The target markets for the mini-servers are Industry 4.0 applications as well as data-intensive applications such as autonomous driving or telemedicine.

With the official presentation of the Universal Internet of Things Connector (UIC), iesy presented another world first at its booth. „As a systems house for embedded computing, UIC benefits to a very high degree,“ Ansgar Hein explains the benefits for iesy. „The additional abstraction layer and the streamlined architecture of the framework, as well as the inclusion of existing APIs, helps in making use of numerous synergies and bundle them into a meaningful and practice-oriented standard.“ In less than a year, SGET, under the auspices of numerous leading manufacturers of embedded modules, developed the UIC standard. As a founding member of the Standardization Board, Hein, who is Head of Innovation & Communication at iesy, has been involved in the development from the outset. According to him, the open source framework is a simplification of distributed systems, regardless of cloud connectivity. Rather, the smart and easy connection of sensors, actuators and devices via a uniform configuration and their rapid multiplication on other devices is one of the key benefits - regardless of whether the data is sent to a local server or to a cloud-based server.