GNARBOX Announces Move into Edge Computing Platforms
LOS ANGELES, March 30, 2021 -- MyGnar Inc is a Los Angeles based Technology Company and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that released its current flagship product, GNARBOX 2.0 SSD in October 2019. In the time since launch, the company has established itself as a leading provider of data backup solutions in the Photo and Video industries with its product ecosystem for Freelance Photographers, Small Production Teams, and Broadcast organizations. The product has earned a reputation as a rugged, reliable, and easy to use system, trusted by an installed base of thousands of teams who use it as the hub of critical data management workflows in the field, protecting valuable digital assets, and speeding the process of delivering to clients.
Today, the company is announcing a new line of products and subscription-based “as-a-service” business model oriented at applications in the large and growing Edge Computing Market, with an initial focus on the Enterprise Drone sector. GNARBOX has recently added an advisory board of executives and strategic business leaders in the enterprise drone and edge computing markets to assist in these efforts. The new products include a purpose built edition of existing hardware for UAV, a server software platform for deploying edge apps using Kubernetes containers, and a new 5G-enabled hardware appliance ecosystem. GNARBOX will continue to actively support their professional photo and video user base while expanding into the edge market.
As industrial organizations leverage a growing array of cameras, drones, sensors, and other data collection devices to improve efficiency, many are not able to analyze, derive insight, and backhaul this information fast enough with the existing cloud-centric model. The central problem is the significant mismatch between the pace of data collection and network bandwidth, and the latest realization is that 5G networks will not completely alleviate this issue. GNARBOX plans to solve these problems with its new product ecosystem, becoming an intelligent buffer to the cloud by acting as an intermediary storage, processing, and syncing solution to ease problematic data bottlenecks and ultimately provide real time improvement and optimization for any company.
“While developing a complete solution for Photo and Video workflow, we built our stack on a containerized architecture with future markets in mind,” says GNARBOX CEO Tim Feess. “The capabilities of a computer like ours are driven by software, and expanding offerings to new applications has been the vision since the beginning. It doesn’t matter if the data being collected is off a photographer’s camera, a powerline inspector’s drone, or an autonomous vehicle at an industrial site — it’s all data in need of storage, processing and upload from the edge. We believe our proven track record in delivering rugged computing ecosystems will help us bring significant value to these markets”
Enterprise Drone
The first application addressed by the new product ecosystem will be in the Enterprise Drone market. Customers in a variety of sectors, including Law Enforcement, Transportation, Agriculture, and Insurance have added UAV to their processes for inspection, monitoring, and analysis. Deploying a drone fleet often entails a combination of cameras, thermal sensors, and LIDAR sensors, which can generate significant volumes of data daily. GNARBOX 2.0 Drone edition will help these customers modernize and streamline their data management workflow, bringing the gold standards trusted by the film and photography industries to drone operators everywhere. GNARBOX has established key partners to conduct market research and product development required to develop a purpose built solution for UAV programs. The result of that research can be found in the ebook Digital Asset Management for UAV Programs co-authored with industry veterans Oren Schauble and Eric Davis of Guinn Partners.
UAV Program Managers who are dissatisfied with the speed and security of moving files from the field to the cloud can deploy the rugged backup device instead of laptops to backup microSD cards, check for data corruption, organize and review files or upload to the cloud. Unlike the laptops or tablets currently being used in the field, GNARBOX 2.0 Drone Edition is water resistant, pocket-sized and has consistent high speed transfers and battery life. When compared to other backup devices on the market like the LaCie Boss or CoPilot, GNARBOX 2.0 Drone Edition offers unparalleled reliability, the ability to connect to the Internet via both cellular and wifi, and integration with industry standard software.
Additional software features require a subscription and will include exclusive configurable settings to automatically organize by Location & Flight and a Pix4D cloud integration. Automated folder organization by Location & Flight can expedite laborious data classification and organization steps that are essential for maintaining a proven and reliable data archive. By integrating with Pix4Dcloud, pilots can upload data from the field to expedite the processing of 2D & 3D datasets.
Price, Availability & Specs
The GNARBOX 2.0 Drone Edition is being delivered through key resellers in the market including, but not limited to MFE, RMUS, Advexure, Empire Drones and UTV.
- 1TB NVMe SSD
- USB-C (x2), SD and Micro HDMI ports
- USB-C transfer 390MB/s & SD backup 75MB/s
- Water, Dust & Shock resistant
- Single-step backup with status and checksum
- 802.11ac WiFi 5 for phone, tablet and cloud connectivity
- 2.4GHz Intel Processor, 4 Core Intel HD Graphics
- DNG image / H.264, H.265, ProRes support
- Removable battery for 3-6hrs of use
- Integrates with Pix4D & Dropbox for cloud uploads
Edge Computing for Autonomous Systems, Enterprise & Industrial IoT
A variety of sectors including Mining, Oil and Gas, Manufacturing, Utilities, Maritime and Shipping & Logistics are embracing Industry 4.0, placing IoT sensors at the edge in order to gather data that can generate insights that enable organizations to save time and money, and increase operational efficiency. While these gains are core values of the market, thus far it has lacked a plug and play solution for data backup, processing and backhaul in a mobile form factor. IT/OT professionals and their System Integrators are often burdened by repurposing datacenter hardware, COTS components, or creating custom greenfield IT projects from scratch to meet edge computing demands. These approaches not only waste valuable time, but introduce risks ranging from issues with reliability, security, scalability, durability, and performance, ultimately failing to leverage insights and operational intelligence processed at the edge with immense future value.
The GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform includes a rugged edge appliance and a server software platform that seamlessly integrates with sensors, unmanned equipment, and other industrial machines in rugged and extreme dynamic environments. Unlike other edge appliances, the GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform is completely mobile, can be run in online or offline environments, and supports any cloud storage/compute platform. Its software stack enables customers to easily run containerized or virtualized applications with zero-touch provisioning, making porting simple and direct. With 3-5 hours of backup battery power, rugged mounting solutions for a multitude of dynamic applications and water/dust ingress-proof ethernet and power cables, the GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform is a complete solution for any field application that requires uninterruptible data backup and backhaul. Hardware specs for the new Edge appliance ecosystem are not yet announced, but the company has revealed that the new hardware will feature expanded storage, the fastest data transfer speeds on the market, a more than a 3x processing performance boost from the GNARBOX 2.0 model, and internal expansion modules for AI/ML acceleration and 5G connectivity.
The Edge product offering combines the new appliances to be released in 2021 with a software stack designed to easily deploy containerized application workloads through a Kubernetes framework. Kubernetes has become a critical path technology for the future of edge computing, allowing organizations to deploy, orchestrate, and govern containerized software at the edge in order to create high availability in resource constrained environments. The zero-touch provisioning process allows non-technical teams to securely field edge technologies with ease while providing IT department or system integrators purpose-built hardware they can easily setup with minimal training. GNARBOX will offer three distinct software solutions for use with the GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform. In order to support legacy applications, the platform can also be configured to support multiple Bare Metal Linux versions or to run multiple virtualized servers.
Edge Partners
The company has also established key partners, enabling the product ecosystem to integrate with industry standard platforms that customers have adopted in their Edge workflows.
Cloud Partner - AWS IoT Greengrass
Since the advent of IoT, the cloud has played a significant role in the transformation of Industry 4.0, with AWS and Azure providing critical infrastructure for digital backhaul. With GNARBOX for AWS IoT Greengrass, System Integrators and existing AWS IoT Greengrass customers can seamlessly deploy the GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform into their existing ecosystem. The GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform is currently undergoing rigorous device qualification and technical validation to be certified in the AWS Partner Device program.
Software Partner - SUSE & Rancher Labs
As many enterprise organizations begin adopting edge technologies, Kubernetes will continue to be a standard technology for the future of edge computing. Kubernetes allows organizations to orchestrate and run containers at the edge in order to maximize available resources, which is especially important when using mini edge appliances. GNARBOX has partnered with SUSE and Rancher Labs to identify a Kubernetes based approach specifically designed for resource constrained or remote locations. This allows GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform users the most efficient Kubernetes based offering, simplifies the OS management and update process and ultimately increases security by limiting an attack surface by eliminating monolithic operating systems that must be patched for vulnerabilities.
Distribution Partner - MFE Rentals
IT and OT Departments often partner with System Integrators to procure and implement equipment, software, and other systems. GNARBOX has elected to partner with MFE Rentals as one of its go to market partners, bringing advanced technology rental, sales, repair and training capabilities to customers in the United States. MFE will carry stock of the Drone Edition product and will support customer integrations of the Edge Computing Platform.
Product Availability
GNARBOX 2.0 Drone Edition: Available for pre-order now, with shipping anticipated 7/2021
GNARBOX Edge Compute Platform: Open for pilot applications now
GNARBOX Edge Appliance Ecosystem: Coming in 2021
About GNARBOX
GNARBOX is a technology company based in Los Angeles, with 7 years of experience as a market leader in the professional photography, videography and drone industry for backup and onsite data processing. The company is backed by the largest installed base of users in these industries, and is the only player in the edge market with experience delivering rugged mobile appliances for computing large data sets.
Source: MyGnar Inc
