This archive report was first published on 2 July 2019.
July 2, 2019 - In a bid to address the growing need for edge data centres, Schneider Electric has released a new White Paper that provides a framework for IT professionals to anticipate potential issues and collaborate with partners to deliver essential infrastructure components.
Edge data centres offer numerous benefits to users across various environments, including industrial, enterprise, and retail consumer settings. However, they also present several challenges, such as building, deploying, and managing them efficiently while ensuring low service and maintenance costs.
Speaking during an interactive partner training session, Edouard Heripret, Schneider Electric's General Manager in East Africa, emphasized the importance of an integrated ecosystem of partners in mitigating edge challenges. He stated, “Effective micro data centres are born from an integrated ecosystem of partners who work together to mitigate edge challenges found in each phase of the project lifecycle and embracing standardisation, integration, cooperative partnerships and cloud-based management tools addresses the current challenges found in edge environments in leaps and bounds.”
According to Worldwide Technology, pre-configuring technology platforms and devices before shipment can increase deployment speed and reduce field engineering costs by 25% to 40%, while also increasing order processing speed by 20% and reducing maintenance costs by 7%.
Wendy Torell, Sr. Research Analyst at Schneider Electric's Science Center, noted that the unique challenges of deploying and maintaining IT at the edge of the network dictate a new collaborative model. She stated, “This highly integrated approach involves vendors and partners working together to make selecting, deploying, and maintaining edge compute solutions much easier and more cost-effective for end-users.”
Today's businesses must rely on cloud-based management software, such as Data Center Management as a Service (DMaaS) solutions, to manage multiple edge data centers efficiently in real-time. Using a combination of pre-integrated hardware solutions and cloud-based software can reduce field engineering costs by between 25% and 40%, while increasing uptime and availability.
