netFIELD is a category of products and services provided by Hilscher, which enable customers to manage distributed Industrial IoT solutions.
netFIELD Cloud is the central management platform to engineer distributed edge devices and their software applications, along with distributed IoT data streams from remote.
netFIELD OS running on the edge devices, such as edge gateways or industrial PCs are upgrading them with remote management capability.
We offer three different runtime solutions in netFIELD on edge devices, which allow you to choose the type of integration that fits your needs best:
- netFIELD OS Edge is a fully managed Linux-based operating system. This runtime type provides the deepest integration into netFIELD Cloud, which enables you to benefit from the complete feature set of netFIELD Cloud.
- netFIELD OS Datacenter is a virtualized version of netFIELD OS running under VMware or KVM on x86 CPU-based machines. This option enables you to run some components of your distributed IoT solution in a data center while managing the software distribution and IoT data flow through netFIELD Cloud.
- netFIELD Extension for Linux is a more lightweight version of our runtime, which can be run on a compatible Linux distribution of your choice. This runtime can be used on hardware platforms, which are not natively supported by netFIELD OS Edge yet. This option is less deeply integrated, so that the available feature set is reduced.
The following table provides a comparison of the three runtime solutions:
| netFIELD OS Edge | netFIELD OS Datacenter | netFIELD Extension for Linux | |
|---|---|---|---|
Device Management | |||
| Device onboarding to netFIELD Cloud | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Device remote access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Device trelemetry transmission | Yes | Yes | No |
| OS updates through netFIELD Cloud | Yes | Yes | No |
| Software Management | |||
| Remote deployment of app containers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Remote configuration of app containers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Remote update of app containers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Data Distribution | |||
| Messaging & data exchange protocol | MQTT | MQTT | MQTT |
| Data addressing scheme | MQTT topics | MQTT topics | MQTT topics |
| Data management and negotiation | Any MQTT Broker | Any MQTT Broker | Any MQTT Broker |
| MQTT-to-netFIELD Cloud connector | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Support for custom data connectors | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hardware and OS Requirements | |||
| Supported hardware devices | netFIELD Connect, netFIELD Compact, netFIELD OnPremise | All hardware platforms supporting VMware® vSphere ESXi or KVM (Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisors | N/A |
| Custom devices support | coming soon | N/A | N/A |
| Supported linux distributions | Included (YOCTO Linux) | Runs on Hypervisors - see above | Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian |