Honeywell Releases Experion PKS IT Highly Integrated Virtual Environment

Honeywell releases Experion PKS IT Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE), a new technology that reportedly centralizes up to 80% of IT infrastructure used in project engineering. This allows industrial manufacturers to lower project delivery and lifecycle costs, better leverage skills and drive consistent physical and cybersecurity management, according to Honeywell.

Experion PKS IT HIVE untethers industrial enterprises from running IT workloads where their controllers are located – instead giving them the freedom and flexibility to run workloads on-site, at a remote data center or a combination of both. By centralizing IT infrastructure and reducing the amount of networking and compute resources required to run on-site, customers can reduce maintenance, refresh costs and free their process control engineers from time-consuming administration to focus on higher-value activities including process optimization. Centralization also allows users to eliminate unused computing infrastructure, benefit from the latest virtualization technology and have experts mitigate cybersecurity risk with established protocols.

The new offering allows users to view and manage their entire infrastructure through a single dashboard at any given location, via a network tunnel that uses existing WANs rather than dedicated, expensive new infrastructure, according to Honeywell. Remote sites are fully protected from the effects of a possible WAN outage.

Experion PKS IT HIVE is one of three elements that form Experion PKS HIVE, an approach that uses Honeywell LEAP project execution principles, software and networking to unchain control applications from physical equipment, and controllers from physical IO. This enables control systems to be engineered and implemented in less time, at lower cost and risk, and with simpler, modular builds, according to Honeywell.