This archive report was first published on 3 July 2019.
July 3, 2019 - In a rapidly digitizing world, providing high levels of compute power, connectivity, and availability requires a hybrid architecture of edge data centers.
Schneider Electric, a leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, has released a new White Paper titled 'Solving Edge Computing Infrastructure Challenges.' The paper outlines a structure for anticipating potential issues at the edge and details how to identify an ecosystem of partners for collaboration, integration, and delivery of essential infrastructure components.
Edge data centers offer numerous benefits across industrial, enterprise, and retail consumer environments but also present challenges in terms of deployment and management. Due to their distributed nature and growing number of deployments, edge sites are often unmanned and lack available IT staff, making them hard to manage efficiently while ensuring low service and maintenance costs.
Speaking during an interactive partner training session, Schneider Electric's General Manager in East Africa, Mr. Edouard Heripret, noted that 'Effective micro data centers 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%, increasing order processing speed by 20% and reducing maintenance costs by 7%.
Wendy Torell, Sr. Research Analyst at Schneider Electric's Science Center, emphasized that 'The unique challenges of deploying and maintaining IT at the edge of the network dictate a new collaborative model.' 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.
The collaborative approach requires an integrated 'edge' ecosystem comprised of IT and infrastructure vendors, original equipment manufacturers, systems integrators, and managed service providers who work together to simplify, accelerate, and ensure resiliency at the edge.
Today's businesses must rely on cloud-based management software, such as Schneider Electric's EcoStruxure IT and on-premise Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools, to manage multiple edge data centers efficiently in real-time.
