Last week Stratus Technologies sponsored our 10th Rockwell Automation Fair event. Over the last ten Automation Fairs the emphasis on IT infrastructure has grown dramatically. Ten years ago IT infrastructure was hard to find at the show, but this year all the elements of modern IT infrastructure were on display.
It’s clear the Connected Enterprise is driving adoption of information solutions and hence the need to host more applications in larger and more complex infrastructure at the plants. We had an exciting demonstration at the Stratus booth. We demonstrated a suite of Rockwell software and a terminal server, managed with ACP ThinManager, all running on the fault-tolerant Stratus ftServer platform. With the help of ACP we also demonstrated zero client displays including a couple iPads. It was pretty cool and the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure were easy to see.
Even with all the benefits of virtualization I was still surprised at how quickly industrial customers are adopting the technology. A survey of our tech session attendees showed that virtualization has achieved significant adoption in the industrial space with over 50% indicating they had used it in their production environments.
