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Schneider Electric’s recent Innovation Summit, held in Hong Kong, provided an ideal stage to talk about the company’s direction and solutions with customers and market influencers including journalists and analysts. The big news was the announcement of EcoStruxure™ IT, a cloud-based data center management solution which aligns with the company’s broader IoT enablement initiatives.
Data Center Management Game Changer
One of the first reviewers to report on the new development was the analyst IDC, which published a 3-page opinion on September 29th in an IDC Link entitled “Transforming Datacenter Management and Creating Smarter Datacenters: Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT.” Authors, Jennifer Cooke, Vernon Turner, Rob Brothers see the game-changing ability of EcoStruxure IT to shift data center management to proactive mode.
EcoStruxure IT, a component of Schneider Electric’s broader EcoStruxure IoT-enabled architecture and platform, is a data center management-as-a-service (DMaaS) solution that enables monitoring and management of data center physical infrastructure across diverse, distributed, and hybrid environments. It runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and initially two modules were announced – — IT Expert and IT Advisor.
In the IDC Link, the analysts say: “IDC has observed that, while a staggering amount of data generated in the data center has been gathered for many years, very little has been done to drive better decisions and outcomes…” And go on to say that the “announcement is an opening salvo to other critical infrastructure manufacturers to improve their ability to not just gather large volumes of data but also drive better outcomes for their customers based on analytics and machine learning.”
“Fed by a data lake containing critical infrastructure performance metrics and status,” say the IDC analysts, “EcoStruxure IT will be able to help organizations predict problems before they occur and optimize their environments.”
At the time of writing, Schneider reported having more than 60,000 device connections, 1.8 million sensors, and 15,000 connected UPSs.
“As the data lake grows,” says the IDC Link, “so does the ability to drive proactive service and support recommendations and improve outcomes… the ability to leverage big data will be especially interesting to service providers and colocation providers that are striving for greater operational efficiency and product differentiation.”
“Much of data center management today is in a reactive mode and responding to alarms. The pressures on data center managers to deliver service quickly and at the scale and scope required is necessitating a change in the way data centers are managed. IDC believes that these pressures will motivate more investment in smarter data center resources to support data center transformation initiatives.”
It is several years since Schneider started the high level EcoStruxure conversation by suggesting that all organizational infrastructure could, and indeed should, be interoperable. In this way, Schneider wanted to demonstrate how embedded technology could be leveraged to deliver higher levels of customer satisfaction through joined-up thinking and convenience, while lowering cost and increasing efficiency for enterprises.
Since that very first announcement, the company has worked to ensure that intelligence and connectivity is at the heart of every product and solution introduction. Today, EcoStruxure brings together advancements in IoT, mobility, sensing, cloud, analytics and cybersecurity, and has been deployed in 450,000+ installations, with the support of 9,000 system integrators, to connect over 1 billion devices.
To download your own copy of the IDC Link, “Transforming Datacenter Management and Creating Smarter Datacenters: Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT” (Doc #lcUS43116117, September 2017) please click here.
