Getting Started with the IoT: The Intelligent Gateway, Part 2 of 2

In this video, Ken Johnson, Senior Director of Product Management at Red Hat, provides a detailed overview of Red Hat’s Intelligent Gateway and discusses its role as an abstraction layer between IoT devices and the datacenter.

Learn more at www.RedHat.com/iot.

To view part 1 of this series, click here.

Transcript

Adrian Bowles: We’ve been talking about intelligence at the gateway. Tell me a little bit about, kind of walk us through, your own architecture for it.

Ken Johnson: Sure thing.

Let’s take a slightly deeper look as to how we envision the technology paths and the data flow paths within the intelligent gateway. In this diagram on the far left you have your sensors, your devices. On the far right you have what we’ll call the back end, your cloud or your data center, and the intelligent gateway is the large box in the middle. What we’re representing here is really two main flows of information through the gateway. We’ll call it the fast data and maybe the slow data channel. But it’s not so much about data speed, it’s about what you’re doing with the data in each of those channels.

The fast data channel represents processing of information that’s coming in and processing it in real time or near real time to take action. Based on sensor data, temperature, speed, what have you, you’re going to analyze that, look at that in the context of a number of readings or time windows, etc., and recommend some action; maybe it could be send an alert back out to the data center, it may be take communicate back to the sensor or device to effect some change. Apply breaks, turn off machine, notify operator. It could be with no communication to the data center or cloud. That fast data path is operating continuously looking at processing data to see some near-real-time result needs to be taken.

The slow data path, if you will, is more aggregation of information, transformation, summarization of information that is dominantly targeted to be pathed to the back-end application, to the data center or the cloud. It could be historical aggregate information, like what are my trends over time, or it could be information that is semi-urgent, but not real-time or near-real-time urgent.

On the fast data path we have our business rules management system, which is an embedded rules engine, that allows you to process events over time. It can look over sliding time windows if certain things happen within a time window, if this happened before that or after that, are these two events correlated in some way. Based on this rapid evaluation, you can take action quickly.

On the slow data path, which actually may even feed into the fast data path a little bit, we have out A-MQ messaging layer, and our JBoss Fuse for transformation. A-MQ can provide protocol transformation, so if you have various devices talking over say MQTT, you can transform that to an A-MQP enterprise protocol for communication to the back end, and Fuse provides format translation, transformation on top of that. So if you need to standardize information coming from different devices into a common form so it’s easier process, aggregate with other information, that can all happen in the intelligent gateway.

Adrian Bowles: Well thanks.

If you want more information about how Red Hat is working with the IoT, go to RedHat.com. For more videos in this series, you can go to RTInsights.com.

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Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, delivers reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux®, middleware, storage, and virtualization technologies that help you collect, communicate, transform, store, and act on critical data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). Red Hat offers a single, extendable, and secure foundation to support the end-to-end life cycle of IoT solutions—from development to production.

Red Hat brings intelligence to the edge, bridging the gap between IT and operational technology for connectivity and interoperability between IoT devices, gateways, datacenters, and the cloud.

Learn more at redhat.com/iot.