Schneider Electric addresses data center issues

MANILA, Philippines - The exponential growth of digital data has been relentless in today’s Internet of Things (IoT) era or the Industrial Internet. Now that everything is connected to the Internet, the impact of the constantly expanding volume and variety of digital data extends well beyond business.

For businesses to leverage big data as a solution to any operational demands, they initially have to ensure that their data centers have the capability of facilitating the transmission, processing, streaming and storage of the rapidly increasing information.

To address these growing demands for data center management, Schneider Electric, with its long-standing heritage as a trusted data center advisor, has revolutionized data center operators, which can achieve the delicate balance of energy/cost-efficiencies and optimal processing power.

Schneider Electric holds the blueprints and industry standards for building reliable, energy-efficient data centers that offer 24/7 availability and high quality of service in the age of IoT and beyond.

During the recent media conference for Schneider Electric in Singapore, Schneider Electric’s senior vice president for the IT Business Global Sales Division, Philippe Arsonneau, said, “Now that the Internet serves as a key to everything we do, we have strengthened our role, which is to define the trend, standards, and the solutions to improve the structure of data center through end-to-end optimization solutions.”

Schneider Electric has a diverse array of data center management solutions to provide businesses with data centers that are capable of storing large data, scalable, flexible enough, and energy-efficient to respond to the imminent demands of big data.

David Blumanis, vice president for Schneider Electric’s Data Center Solutions and Key Account Management in the Asia-Pacific and Japan, also sees the need for more data center management demands as both developed and developing countries continue to consume larger data especially with the emergence of new technologies.

He said, “Everyone has got one or two mobile devices now that are actually coming up into play and the number of these devices continue growing in a very fast pace. We are very thirsty for data and technology as we move forward so we are seeing a massive shift to mobile connectivity and mobile data, and all these are creating a massive explosion of data. How do we actually bring all these data to you and make sure we now have networks to deliver all these data?”

That’s the question that Schneider addresses.

As the demand for cost-efficient data centers continues to grow, Schneider Electric recently came out with its StruxureWare Data Center Operation v7.4, which allows data-extensive businesses to have new capabilities and access to actionable intelligence for an ideal balance of high availability and peak efficiency all through the data center life cycle.

As part of Schneider Electric’s data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution, this StruxureWare for data centers will advance co-location management, power monitoring and network management, helping data center and facility managers free up power capacity, right-size physical infrastructure and integrate with existing DCIM systems, thus reducing capital and operational costs.

“We have to be able to align the StruxureWare solution and its information with the company’s business goal and service goals to generate value to the business and the core business functions,” said Andrew Sylvester, software manager for data center software solution of Schneider Electric’s IT business for the Asia-Pacific.

In addition, StruxureWare Data Center Operation v7.4 enables data center managers to manage capacity and conduct impact analysis down to the breaker level, providing added understanding of the power chain and the ability to reduce stranded capacity — a feature unique to Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare solution.

While Schneider Electric continues to develop its software solutions, the company has also invested significantly in its hardware facilities. There’s also more emphasis given on the need for highly sophisticated data centers especially amid the ever-changing technology trends where enormous growth in data and data storage has been forcing the market growth to build data centers.

“Data centers become larger and larger. There are a lot of challenges associated to this. There are also many challenges from a design perspective to actually increase efficiencies,” said Siegfried Drexler, enterprise business development manager for the Infrastruxure data center solutions — traditional and prefabricated of Schneider Electric’s IT business for the Asia-Pacific and Japan.

With this, Schneider Electric also unveiled its prefabricated data centers, deemed to be a revolutionary approach given their flexibility and customization. Comprising these prefabricated data centers are all-in-one configurations, power skids and modules, cooling and hydronics modules, and IT modules.

“Prefab is actually building blocks that can be put in a traditional but also in a fully prefabricated or containerized facility that cater to quicker deployments, overall cost-savings, scalability and predictability,” Drexler said.

Drexler added: “We are looking at the life cycle of the data centers. They have to cope with technology refreshes every three to five years. Can a data center that is planned for 30 years cope with these changes? This is one of the major areas of frustration for customers operating data centers that they have to make multiple changes.”

Drexler said, “We really have the global capabilities and we are the most experienced when it comes to traditional and prefabricated data center solutions. We can meet all market needs.”

All these groundbreaking technologies by Schneider Electric provide powerful options in addressing the rapidly growing data that challenge many businesses these days and more so in the future. Not only will they ensure businesses more capable data management and cost efficiency, but more importantly, it also translates to a sustainable future.