Panasonic Connect and Red Hat partner on RHEL-certified TOUGHBOOK

Panasonic Connect offers some of the most resilient devices in the world. Used by emergency services, field engineers, and the federal civilian and defense sectors, TOUGHBOOKs are certified on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, which streamlines the deployment process for busy IT teams by reducing the time and resources needed for testing and certification. That means agencies can quickly maintain and deploy edge computing devices to critical workers with total confidence that they have flexible, high-performing devices they can rely on in extreme conditions.

We spoke to John Harris, the TOUGHBOOK lead at Panasonic Connect, about his journey. Read on to learn about his experience with open source, real-world examples of what makes Panasonic Connect and Red Hat such a great partnership, and how to design a product that caters to a diverse customer base.

John Harris, Manager, Technology Strategy, Panasonic Connect: The edge is where humans interact with their devices―that could be a PC in an office, a smart phone, or tablet in the hands of an engineer in the field, a device in an emergency response vehicle, or a rugged laptop used by military personnel.

At Panasonic we try to really understand how customers work with those devices, and that’s been our approach for nearly 30 years. We created the first TOUGHBOOK when a customer came to us with a very specific request for a rugged device that didn’t exist. We worked with them to test, iterate, and learn from our mistakes, and ended up making a best-selling device that’s been a hit with customers across sectors ever since.

Harris: We have vigorous quality assessment processes in place, so when a device goes for testing, we’re confident it will pass. We handle design, development, manufacturing, testing, certification, selling, and service in house, so we have a feedback loop to capture and understand any issues.

We’ve spent 30 years learning how to make rugged devices. We pull a small percentage for testing each week. We have vibration tables, humidity, and extreme temperature chambers. We expose them to dust and water. There’s a lot of respect for the process; each team wants to get it right before they hand over to the next. All that means we know we’re giving customers reliable, world-class devices that guarantee customer satisfaction.

Harris: Technology moves quickly, and the industry wants new features in people’s hands to make money. That’s not how we operate. Our customers don’t have the budget to constantly replace things; they work in a 5-year cycle. Having said that, we need to be able to adapt to trends like 5G and artificial intelligence (AI), so we use a modular design with a base that caters to the many, and ports to add new modules. For example, there’s a module to add a card reader, DVD drive, or second SSD.

Some of our field engineers work long hours and need extra power. All our devices have end-user removable batteries which can quickly, and easily, be swapped out if required. Our customers get one device that does everything they need it to, from picking up jobs on the road and staying in touch with colleagues, to being able to plug into their end-customer’s equipment to run diagnostics, for example. They get the best return on investment on an IT asset that’s allowing them to do their jobs more efficiently.

Harris: A great example of TOUGHBOOKs and RHEL working together is how they support defense forces in combat or emergency response situations. They’re working in very challenging environments. You’ve got personnel in remote locations, exposed to the elements, relying on these devices in life-or-death situations. The need for reliability, security, resilience, and flexibility doesn’t get much more critical than that.

It’s difficult to deploy and manage IT systems in that environment. There needs to be interoperability between command devices, platforms, and personnel. There are multidomain networks, and data needs to be processed quickly to support decision making and, increasingly, to power AI.

RHEL delivers enhanced, enterprise-level security and encryption, a unified platform for cloud and edge computing, and it’s air-gapped. It can process data quickly, it’s scalable, and containerized apps speed up deployment. Meanwhile, the TOUGHBOOK can withstand shocks and drops, and there are specialized modules for advanced encryption and other military-specific uses. They work in vehicles, allow secure communication on the battlefield, and help command centers to coordinate operations and adapt quickly to changing demands in near-real time.

Harris: The clue is in the term ‘open source’. It’s transparent; there’s nothing you can’t see. If you need to troubleshoot you can get into the weeds and find out what’s actually happening to fix it. There’s also a huge amount of documentation, and the community is great. There’s support available for every aspect of design and development.

When I was new to open source, the community was so welcoming. The people understand that you want to learn, so they’re willing to spend the time to educate you and answer your questions. And no one is patronizing: if you ask them to break things down into steps’ they’ll do that for you. If you have a problem in the morning, there’ll be a way to fix it with open source in just a few hours. From an engineering point of view that’s really satisfying.

Today, I’m comfortable working in open source. I feel like I understand it and how it works. I know how to update and patch it. What to do and what not to do. It’s been a learning curve, but a good one, and I’m happy I picked up a new skill.

Harris: Our Red Hat Account Manager and Technical Account Manager are great. We have a very open relationship and a regular call to talk about anything I’m having trouble with. The Red Hat certification team has also been super helpful. The people there know I’m working on my own and running certification on multiple devices. Because we have such a good relationship, I can be honest and say: ‘This is new to me, can you walk me through it?’ Both of our organizations benefit from our partnership. We’re also creating documentation, so that feedback loop is really useful to understand what it needs to include to help my team in the future.

Harris: We were working on a cutting-edge sound chipset that was totally different from anything else, and the way we’d implemented circuity and audio codecs was preventing us from passing certification. No one in the open source community had seen anything like it, so we raised a ticket and Red Hat connected us to an experienced expert.

I was only 6 months into my learning experience with Red Hat OpenShift, so I didn’t know how to do some of the things he asked, but Red Hat sought out the best people on the planet to help with the RHEL image and we overcame the problem. Red Hat employs people who really know what they’re doing, and that brings a huge amount of value to the partnership.

Harris: Jump in! If you have an old device that you can trash and reinstall, that’s a great learning tool. If you get it wrong, you can wipe it and start again. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do things, and lots of documentation online. Once you get your head around things like grep, it becomes really easy. 

Attention to detail really matters, so check that what you’ve typed into the command line is correct. If you get error messages, copy and paste the exact message into Google and you’ll find the answer. You also need to learn the keyboard shortcuts, because they’re not the same as other systems. When you’ve mastered these points, it will become a lot easier

Harris: I’m excited about the future. There’s an opportunity for us to work together to expand where Red Hat is sitting on edge technologies to where we are, and to include things like being able to certify a barcode scanner, serial port, or second LAN. We’re going to be working on that moving forward because that’s where we see the market going.