ZPE Systems

In today’s day and age of cloud computing that firmly lies at the edge of the network, Edge computing still is a relatively new concept and is yet to receive widespread recognition. However, that hasn’t stopped ZPE Systems from developing the industry’s first ever ‘Open Infrastructure Management Solution™’—an open infrastructure, open hardware, and open software design. It is an open framework infrastructure that is built at the edge of the network. “With ZPE Systems, we brought a new concept, where the appliances in the data center were built on top of an open framework—from hardware to software, which is in-line with the current trends at the moment,” says Arnaldo Zimmermann, Co-Founder, and CEO of ZPE Systems.

The company delivers a vendor-neutral environment where it can interact with IT devices inside data centers—mostly networking devices, power management devices, and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) devices. Most of the time, customers use purpose-built products that have minimal capabilities. The lack of flexibility in purpose-built products is a major limiting factor, and this is what ZPE aims to change. Built on 64-bit Intel-based open framework and interoperability, the hardware and software give customers new perspectives on how they can manage and deploy their data centers. “By opening the platform, we got a new view sense of what is possible in the data center. Along with automation, our customers can do more with a limited number of resources,” explains Zimmermann.

ZPE’s solutions incorporate the data center approach of easy deployment and integration at the edge of the network with zero-touch provisioning. Zero-touch provisioning enables customers to connect the device to the network, after which, the table retrieves the configurations, firmware updates, additional instructions, and self-configure the guidelines from a central location.

The firm also puts a huge emphasis on security, ensuring that the devices are bulletproof and it also performs vulnerability checks for penetration and investigation

Large organizations have points of presence and deployment—something that remote offices would like to enjoy as well, with the same type of IT infrastructure management. However, these remote locations may not have the technical expertise or the IT personnel supporting them like a data center. ZPE has made it possible for a round the clock presence in these offices so that IT teams can provide the support and can bring the system back online if anything is happening on the edge. ZPE’s devices are capable of 4G LTE cellular connectivity, which allows for reconnection to the edge securely over IPSec and VPN in the event of a network failure. The firm also puts a huge emphasis on security, ensuring that the devices are bulletproof and it also performs vulnerability checks for penetration and investigation. The level of protection is maintained because the software is continually being updated with the current environment in mind, enabling much faster reactions to new discoveries in the market.

“Because the edge has no standard and every location is built out completely different, having the flexibility to have a device at that location while offering remote support or monitoring is our way of being flexible at that edge,” says Alvin Chan, Marketing Manager at ZPE Systems. Being on the edge, ZPE can continuously add additional functionalities and capabilities, either in the form of virtual machines or Network function virtualization (NFV) in the form of a docker application. ZPE also supports additional tools in cases when customers use a Puppet, Chef or Ansible management configuration interface and this support enables the customers to scale with ease.

ZPE is actively expanding to other markets and has partnered with organizations in Europe, Asia, USA, South America and Australia. In terms of offerings, the firm will be adding additional features at the edge on its platform with applications that can be hosted on it. ZPE also plans to offer extra abilities as virtualized applications on the solution.