Honeywell Introduces New Industry Approach for Management and Hosting of Control System Infrastructure

Experion® PKS IT Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) centralizes up to 80% of IT infrastructure, reducing costs and freeing engineering talent to focus on higher-value activities

​HOUSTON, Feb. 4, 2020 -- Honeywell today announced the release of Experion^® PKS IT Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE), a transformative new technology that 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.

Experion PKS IT HIVE is the first solution to untether 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. Furthermore, centralization allows customers to eliminate unused computing infrastructure, benefit from the latest virtualization technology and have experts mitigate cybersecurity risk with established protocols.

“Experion PKS IT HIVE re-writes the industry rule book on how control system IT infrastructure should be hosted and managed,” said Joe Bastone, director, Experion PKS Product Management, Honeywell Process Solutions. “Building on Honeywell’s 10 years of industrial virtualization experience, customers can now place their workloads where it makes the most strategic and practical sense. This allows them to eliminate on-site infrastructure and consolidate IT management and cybersecurity in a private, secure and centralized location.”

The new solution allows customers 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. 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.

The other two elements are Experion PKS IO HIVE, which provides flexible IO and control distribution, enabling the control system to become a natural extension of process equipment and to facilitate modular and parallel project execution. Experion PKS Control HIVE uniquely applies control containers to provide flexibility and standardization of control hardware platforms, control location and control engineering.

For more information, visit Honeywell Experion PKS HIVE.

Honeywell (www.honeywell.com) is a Fortune 100 technology company that delivers industry-specific solutions that include aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings and industry; and performance materials globally. Our technologies help aircraft, buildings, manufacturing plants, supply chains, and workers become more connected to make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable. For more news and information on Honeywell, please visit www.honeywell.com/newsroom.