Raspberry Pi[1] single-board computers are wildly popular with makers, kids, and anyone who likes hands-on computing. But, in enterprise business? Industrial sites? Not so much. Or, are they? At SUSECon[2] in Nashville, Tenn., SUSE[3] executives revealed that three customers are already deploying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES[4]) on Raspberry Pi computers.
To be precise, these companies are all using Raspberry Pi Compute Modules[5]. This is a Raspberry Pi 3[6] in a form factor that's designed for industrial applications,
The first customer, Knorr-Bremse[7], is a German manufacturing company. This business has old equipment with no built-in monitoring. It's using a SLES-powered Raspberry Pi device to track what its gear is doing. Not bad for a 1.2GHz ARM BCM2837 processor with a 1GB RAM and 4GB eMMC Flash device instead of an SD card.
SUSE can't reveal the name of the other companies yet. But we know what they're doing. The first is an automotive manufacturing firm. It's deploying 8,000 Raspberry Pi units to monitor its production line for outages. A city will be using 4,000 Raspberry Pi units outdoors to monitor water-levels and environmental conditions.
Let there be no doubt about it. The Raspberry Pi is much, much more than a toy.
Besides Raspberry Pi, SUSE also supports selected systems on chips (SoC) from AMD, Ampere Computing, AWS, Broadcom, HiSilicon, Marvell/Cavium, NXP, Rockchip, Qualcomm, and Xilinx with