Most Powerful Open Source ERP

Rapid.Space for Industry 4.0

Rapid.Space Hyper Open Cloud platform provides all essential services to deploy Industry 4.0 based on open source software, hardware and operation management procedures.
  • Last Update:2020-07-28
  • Version:008
  • Language:en

Agenda

  • Rapid.Space
  • Industry 4.0
  • Rapid.Space vs. Conventional Platforms

This presentation has five parts.

First, we introduce Rapid.Space, its founders and goals.

Second, we introduce the current state of Rapid.Space in terms infrastructure and scope.

We then explain the advantage of Rapid.Space concept compared to other cloud solutions.

In a fourth part, we introduce how Rapid.Space can be used by developers through a minimal set of services.

In the fifth part we provide a practical comparison between Rapid.Space and other cloud solutions.

Rapid.Space

Rapid.Space may be a new name for you. We are going to present here who we are and what is our goals.

Founders

Rapid.Space was founded in 2020 by Nexedi, Amarisoft and a few VIPs of the IT and telecom inudustries.

Nexedi brings its open source stack, in particular its billing platform, its edge-cloud platform and its big data platform, all open source.

Amarisoft brings its purely software defined 4G/5G stack which covers all aspects needed for commercial deployment, including SA, NSA, NBIoT, etc.

Goals

  • Independence, trust and cost control through reversibility
  • A reversible alternative to conventional public clouds
  • A reversible alternative to Palantir platform
  • A reversible Edge platform for I4.0 (PLC, OPC-UA)
  • A reversible converged RAN platform (4G/5G)

The goal of Rapid.Space is to provide sovereignty and trust through full reversibility. You may consider this goal as providing the kind of thing that companies such as Huawei, Palantir or AWS are not able to provide due a combination IP and legal policies.

This goal applies to every business which Rapid.Space is targetting.

Rapid.Space already provides a reversible cloud platform that can be used for public or private clouds. All components of this platform are open source, including the hardware, meaning that any customer can "clone" this platform on-premise or have it operated by a third party at no license cost.

Rapid.Space intends to provide a reversible big data platform with a scope simllar to Palantir.  All components of this platform are open source, including the hardware, meaning that any customer can "clone" this platform on-premise or have it operated by a third party  at no license cost.

Rapid.Space intends to provide a reversible Edge computing platform which includes everything needed for Industry 4.0, including PLC, sensors, actuators. Again, all components are open source.

Rapid.Space intends to provide a reversible RAN platform which supports 4G/5G and can be used for both private and public networks. Most components are open source. Some components may be licensed source, meaning that any customer can "clone" this platform on-premise and audit its source code at some license cost.

Rapid.Space

 

A Global Cloud Provider

 

Industry 4.0

Let us now discuss how Rapid.Space can be used by developers to host their applications or IT infrastructure.

Advanced Services (preview)

Some types of services can be difficult or time-consuming to implement. This is the case of services that require clustering (use of multiple servers), hard real-time (industrial edge) or radio frequencies (4G/5G VRAN).

For each of these services, Rapid.Space provides a solution based on open source software.

Rapid.Space provides a "Big Data" platform that combines the features of a data lake with transactional object storage, high-availability scalable relational database and out-of-core data processing in python (AI, physical models).

Rapid.Space provides an "Edge" platform that is optimised for automation (factory, building, etc.) and remote deployment of AI models.

Rapid.Space provides a "VRAN" network management system suitable for 4G/5G private networks (factories, hospitals, etc.) or public networks (telecom, government).

All advanced services are available to selected B2B customers as preview. General availability is expected in 2021.

All services are provided with source code under open source license (Big Data, Edge) or business license (VRAN).

Big Data Platform

Wendelin is an open-source, 100% Python-based platform for data ingestion, storage, analysis, and visualisation. It covers the following features:

  • general purpose data hub (Wendelin)
  • object storage (file, ndarray, image, video, etc.)
  • relational storage (mariadb with repman)
  • streaming (fluentd)
  • batch transfer (embulk)
  • serverless python (scikit-learn, scikipy, keras etc.)
  • out-of-core processing (wendelin.core)
  • interactive visualisation (iodide)
  • high availability
  • high performance

Rapid.Space's Wendelin industrialises the complete chain of data-based applications from the collection of data at the edge over local IoT bridges to the central data analysis and visualisation on the cloud. Thanks to the integration of popular data science technologies such as Jupyter, SciPy, Pandas, Plotly and scikit-learn, the Wendelin platform provides an extensive collection of data analysis tools.

Wendelin is suited for industrialisation and unification of data-based services from data collection to visualisation. The ingestion and transformation of data is modelled by a business process-oriented approach, enabling traceability of data supply chains and pricing of data transformations.

Data Lake

Wendelin supports the real-time collection of data from multiple sources (machines, websites, e-commerce, clients and suppliers). Data engineers can choose from more than 100 ready-made plugins for different web services and databases thanks to the integration of ARM's open-source data collection solutions Fluentd (for streaming) and Embulk (for batch data). Collected raw data can then be aggregated and structured with PyData libraries such as Pandas and SciPy and finally be analysed automatically with machine learning tools such as scikit-learn or TensorFlow. Examples are intelligent searches and finding correlations.

Data Science Industrialisation

The business process-oriented approach of managing data analysis operations makes Wendelin a perfect fit for unification and automation of recurring data science tasks on a production system. Wendelin unifies data engineering through the usage of Python on both the analysis environment and the production cluster. All data is stored in Wendelin's distributed transactional object database NEO. Native out-of-core access to persistent NumPy ndarrays provided by the wendelin.core library allows for scalable analytics. Analysis operations can be implemented without restrictions on the available memory, and they do not need to be recompiled for running on the production cluster. With wendelin.core the complete NumPy API is available when accessing out-of-core ndarrays (unlike other solutions such as Apache Spark or Dask, which depend on a compatibility layer).

Scalable RDB

Wendelin includes a scalable cloud-based implementation of MariaDB which provides high availability and high performance relational storage, as well as ETL-type connectors to other relational storages.

Success Cases & Services

The components of the Wendelin platform, ERP5, NEO and SlapOS are successfully used in automotive (PSA, Toyota) and aerospace industries (Airbus Defence and Space). Wendelin itself is used in Germany for ice detection on wind turbines and noise and vibration monitoring of construction sites. Services provided by Nexedi cover automation of data collection at the edge, deployment and management of a Wendelin cloud, analysis and visualisation as well as consulting on single topics or implementation of full-fledged big data applications on the Wendelin stack.

Industrial Edge

  • real time kernel
  • virtual PLC
  • AI model as a service
  • rugged hardware

Rapid.Space's Edge operates seamlessly as an extension of Rapid.Space cloud that can offload at the Edge critical services that can not be hosted on the cloud.

Rapid.Space's Edge solution is based on rugged industrial hardware from selected vendors of open source hardware (Edge-core, Olimex).

It is designed for applications such as Industry 4.0, smart buildings, hospitals, etc. It supports continuous operation of critical functions that need to remain available even in case of Internet or cloud downtime. 

This includes industrial automation (virtual PLC), AI model as a service, IoT buffering, resilient networking and safety functions.

3D Simulation of PLC

 

Virtual PLC in real world

 

4G/5G DSS VRAN

Rapid.Space VRAN in an "all-in-one" solution to deploy public or private radio networks that can share the same frequency bands for both 4G and 5G thanks to DSS protocol.

Rapid.Space's VRAN solution is based on rugged industrial hardware from selected vendors (Edge-core, BJT, AW2S).

Rapid.Space includes automated network operation management suitable for private networks with thousands of users deployed over unlicensed frequencies.

A dedicated Rapid.Space infrastructure can also be provided to deploy public networks over licensed frequencies with millions of users. It is described in this sample offer.

By removing vendor lock-in and technology silos, Rapid.Space VRAN service can support innovative applications based on the convergence of cloud computing, edge computing and telecommunications.

Rapid.Space vs. Conventional Platforms

Rapid.Space is different. It is Hyper Open, which brings reversibility, portability, sovereignty and trust. It is also minimalist. It does not try to offer too much in order to create a vendor lock-in.

This makes Rapid.Space excellent in terms of long term cost, control and interoperability.

But it requires more effort initially.

Hyper Open

  • Transparent cost structure
  • Contribute your own cloud service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
  • Contribute your own DC
  • Deploy on-premise
  • Build a private infrastructure
  • Interoperable with 3rd party public or private clouds

All costs of Rapid.Space are public and described in "Business Model of a Low Cost Cloud Operator". The price of Rapid.Space is based on electricity, real estate, hardware amortisation, networking, operation management costs (software, human), hardware maintenance, financial costs. A 20% margin is added to cover all other risks related to the operation of a cloud service.

Anyone can contribute to Rapid.Space their own service in addition to the 70+ existing ones.

Anyone can contribute servers and datacenter to extend the worldwide coverage of Rapid.Space, as long as Rapid.Space procedures are respected.

Rapid.Space can be deployed on-premise too in a way that is typical of hybrid cloud.

It is also possible for one to operate a completely private infrastructure based, as Teralab does.

It is even possible to deploy Rapid.Space services on third-party public or private clouds (AWS, OVH, Azure, Alicloud, Hertzner, Huawei, VMWare, etc.) and benefit from all Rapid.Space services including its IPv6 backbone, CDN, IaaS, PaaS, etc. 

Basically, there is no blocker, no secret, no anti-competitive practice of any sort in Rapid.Space.

Price

  CPU Core RAM SSD Purchase Lease Hosted /core /GB /TB
Leopard Xeon_v3 24 256GB 4TB 3,700€ 115€/m 195€/m <10€ <0.8€ <50€
TiogaPass Xeon_Silver 20 256GB 4TB 4,700 € 145€/m 195€/m <10€ <0.8€ <50€
CAPRI Zen_2 64 1024GB 4x4TB 14,000€ 425€/m 495€/m <8€ <0.5€ <30€
CAPRI Zen_2 64 1024GB 10x15TB 34,000€ 1040€/m 1110€/m <18€ <1.1€ <8€

 

  • 2 to 10 times less than US competition
  • 4 to 20 times less than China competition
  • 30% to 60% less than EU competition

Currently, EU has the cheapest prices for cloud. Rapid.Space is only 30% to 60% cheaper compared to EU brands.

US and China have the most expensive prices. Rapid.Space is 2 to 20 times cheaper compared to US or China brands.

Guaranteed worldwide delivery

Thanks to its global IPv6 backbone and its CDN front-ends, it is possible to create simple applications that will select automatically the best front-end for each user. Thanks to this technology, users can always access corporate applications (ERP, CRM, etc.) with 100% success rate. This approach is much more suitable for corporate applications than DNS based technologies which only provide 99% success rate. 99% is fine for e-commerce. But if the accountant of a company can not access the ERP of a company (because he or she is the 1% of the 99%), it is not acceptable.

Reversible

  Rapid.Space Conventional Public Cloud
Custom Services 100% open source software
open source hardware
open source operation procedures 		based on open source software
open source hardware
secret operation procedures

A developer can start with Rapid.Space on a public cloud and later move on premise and become completely independent.

Because Rapid.Space is Hyper Open, developers are allowed build a "clone of Rapid.Space". Unlike conventional clouds, all software, all operation management procedures are open source. There is no vendor lock-in.

Rapid.Space even sells the same hardware as the one it uses: http://shop.rapid.space/

Long Term Cost

  Rapid.Space Conventional Public Cloud
POC cost Low to Medium Low
MVP cost Medium Low
Long term cost Low High

As a minimalist and hyper open cloud, Rapid.Space provides the best solution for long term cost control.

It is also ideal for any developer concerned by security, privacy or reversibility.

However, this can have a cost. Rapid.Space does not provide the same level of documentation, tutorials and sometimes "on site" assistance as conventional public clouds. Developers need to be already used to GNU/Linux to benefit from the most of Rapid.Space.

A well trained developer will not find this to be a problem, especially if he or she has been using Linux for a long time. Rapid.Space VPS, CDN and SDN are far enough to develop a POC or MVP.

For a scalable commercial product, the effort to automate all operation management with buildout may be significant. Yet, there is no better or more efficient alternative on the market because most devops tool tend to ignore the feedback loop between monitoring and orchestration. 

For a serious commercial project, this significant cost of developing custom buildout scripts will be compensated by cost control and reversibility which are not available on conventional public clouds.

Thank You

  • Rapid.Space International
  • Paris
  • +33629024425 - jp@rapid.space

For more information, please contact Jean-Paul, CEO of Rapid.Space (+33 629 02 44 25 or jp@rapid.space).