BRESSNER Technology GmbH is a provider of complete industrial hardware and software solutions. Over the last 25 years the company has built up a comprehensive and yet highly specialized product portfolio for individual all-in-one hardware systems as well as components for any industrial environment. It offers high-end products and excellent IT services for industrial segments such as Machine Automation, Manufacturing, Logistics & Transportation, Intelligent Retail, Smart Cities, Industrial IoT, Networking, Healthcare, Security, AI and Deep Learning. BRESSNER Technology has been part of the US-headquartered NASDAQ company One Stop Systems Inc. (OSS), since 2018.
Interview with Athanasios Koutsouridis, Content Marketing Manager at BRESSNER Technology GmbH.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Athanasios Koutsouridis: As a specialized manufacturer and value-added distributor, BRESSNER Technology is not only offering future-proof hardware, but also a comprehensive range of pre- and post-sales services. BRESSNER is able to deliver customized solutions, by leveraging its growing partner network and the continuous acquisition of new technologies. The company has developed a wide array of international partnerships, which allows BRESSNER to deliver any kind of computing solution for any kind of industrial environment. The company features expert consulting, individual customizations, modern ESD-protected facility grounds, excellent tech support and many more benefits for customers all around the globe.
E.E: What’s the news about new products?
A.K: The company constantly releases new products in accordance with its parent company OSS and keeps expanding its range of services. As a world leader in PCIe expansions and HPC hardware, the most recent additions include PCIe Gen5 hardware expansions such as the Gen5 4U Pro acceleration system as well as two Gen5 expansion backplanes. The hardware supplier also regularly adds new generations of embedded and HMI products with updated CPUs, chipsets, RAMs, GPUs and more.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
A.K: Customizing and providing industrial-grade computing hardware is BRESSNER’s main focus, therefore the company can offer:
- Embedded computers
- Embedded Modules and mainboards
- Panel PCs and touch displays
- 19-inch industrial servers
- GPU-accelerated high-performance solutions
- PCIe and PCI expansions
- Rugged tablets and industrial handhelds
- Industrial IoT and networking solutions
- Flash storage hardware
- Medical solutions
- Unified communications hardware and software
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
A.K: The current geo-political and pandemic situation has resulted in a global crisis for manufacturers and shipments, especially for components such as semiconductors. This has led to supply shortages among international hardware providers, which are still affecting many industries.
In order to counteract the current development, BRESSNER has, among other things, increased its inventory stock. The company was able to cushion most of the bottlenecks very well, due to a close communication and cooperation with customers and partners.
Furthermore, the current trade dispute between China and USA does not affect the company at all. The additionally imposed taxes only apply to products imported from China into the United States. Even though BRESSNER is part of a US company, they operate independently as a German company.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
A.K: Edge computing applications are on the rise and artificial intelligence is a driving factor in accelerating this development. However, BRESSNER is currently focusing on ruggedized mobile HPC applications for the AI Transportables market segment.
AI Transportables differs from traditional edge AI infrastructures by enabling input/output, networking, and storage resources familiar from data centers in harsh environments. Traditionally, systems optimized for mobile applications are limited in throughput because they use less sophisticated and therefore less powerful HPC subcomponents. Upcoming AI applications, such as autonomous driving, however, require the collection of large data sets and fast inference without sacrificing performance. The backbones of these AI architectures are usually graphics processing units (GPUs), which handle the bulk of computations. Bus speeds have doubled with PCIe Gen 4.0 and PCIe Gen 5.0 will further double the bandwidth, giving PCIe-based end devices a significant performance boost.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
A.K: The OSS PCIe Gen5 4U Pro is currently the most advanced PCIe expansion system that combines the power of the latest PCIe Gen 5.0 add-in cards with an optimized, feature-rich, and semi-rugged design for the most demanding HPC edge applications. The appliance supports up to eight NVIDIA® H100 PCIe GPUs which deliver 2.5x FP64 performance compared to the NVIDIA® H100, and four PCIe Gen 5 x16 HIB/NIC slots for up to 256GB/s of sustained data throughput.
Furthermore, BRESSNER is aiming to collaborate with AI-BLOX edge intelligence solutions. AI-BLOX delivers a modular AI hardware solution built around the NVIDIA® Jetson family. Its customizable communication and I/O modules make it one of the most flexible AI hardware for edge applications on the market.
E.E: What estimations do you have for the rest of 2022?
A.K: As NVIDIA® has released the Jetson AGX Orin development kit, which offers server-grade AI performance in a small form factor, we expect hardware suppliers to quickly latch onto this high-end piece of technology. We will be implementing the Orin module into the AI-BLOX solutions as well as our GPU computers and HPC server solutions soon, starting with a single Orin modular solution up to a dual Orin solution in 2023.