Resilience at the Edge must be made a priority, as data centres move away from traditional, centralised models. However, there will be significant challenges ahead, according to Schneider Electric’s Jim Simonelli, Senior Vice President (SVP) Emerging Businesses. During a session held at the Data Centres of The Future Theatre, at Data Centre World, titled ‘The Digital Transformation of Data Centres’, he looked at how today’s hybrid IT requirements have evolved via the adoption of new technologies including liquid cooling, micro data centres, prefabrication and cloud-based management software. He outlined the key considerations for this growing trend, and how companies can become ready for the imminent arrival of ultra fast, low latency 5G networks.
Speaking to Mission Critical Power magazine, Simonelli commented that the industry is “no longer about monolithic, single-entity, centralised data centres”; the sector is evolving towards regional Edge data centres and becoming a hybrid, complex IT environment.
Schneider Electric asserts that, as demands for immediate access and application availability increase, data centre and IT environments are becoming more critical, hybrid and distributed. Management has become increasingly complex as operators must now support a multitude of deployment sites, from on-premises and cloud, to colocation and edge applications.
The requirement to manage and operate these vast and complex environments holistically is driving a need to provide solutions that deliver visibility across, and within, a customer’s entire IT ecosystem – for benchmarking, trend analysis, intelligent maintenance and more…all while reducing risks and increasing efficiency.
Simonelli points out that ensuring end-to-end availability across this whole dimension will be a key challenge, in the future, and new technologies will be required to help manage these systems.
Schneider Electric’s white paper,‘Why Cloud Computing is Requiring us to Rethink Resiliency at the Edge‘ provides in-depth insight into some of the key issues raised around availability. It states that the typical design practices at the Edge are often inadequate given the mission critical nature of these sites. Improvements should focus on:
- Physical security
- Monitoring (DCIM), operational practices, remote monitoring
- Redundant power and cooling
- Dual network connectivity
To find out more, click on the video link above.
