Building the optimised data centre

Schneider Electric - Around the world, cloud and IT providers are scaling their capabilities and accelerating expansion programmes to meet skyrocketing infrastructure demand from the ongoing pandemic.

Enterprises are not spared, as employees work from home and cities go into lockdown. Many have scrambled to support the surge in demand for remote access to corporate IT services from remote workers.

Enterprise challenges

With the situation unlikely to abate anytime soon, enterprises have shown renewed interest in data centre designs that are quicker to deploy and easier to manage. And with cost pressure at an all-time high, these new deployments must be manageable with existing staffing levels without compromising reliability.

As noted by Jean-Baptiste Plagne of Schneider Electric, the new deployment models are vital to meet the new normal. In many cases, this might entail revamping existing systems to maximise performance, simplify management and optimise their operational cost.

Moreover, enterprises are also turning to blended deployments with a centralised data centre for core compute and storage, with support from edge computing nodes to meet the larger geographical footprint of home workers.

Top considerations

As enterprises reimagine their on-premises facilities, they are looking for capabilities that help them fulfil essential requirements with higher degrees of automation and remote management.

Some of these requirements include:

• Speed of deployment: The ability to deliver new hardware systems straight to the data centre and have them brought online quickly and efficiently. Whether storage, server or networking equipment, there should be no need for laborious deployments for already- stretched IT departments.

• Flexibility: From micro edge systems to large, modular, data centres, architecture should not be the limiting factor to new deployments. Core considerations such as power protection, cooling requirements, physical security should be automatically matched to the current and projected loads of the facility.

• Manageability: Equipment in distributed locations should deliver maximum reliability through a combination of remote monitoring and proactive maintenance. The latter is a cornerstone of heightened uptime and should automatically initiate alerts when a deviation in the readings of key system parameters is detected.

Look to EcoStruxure

EcoStruxure IT, the next generation DCIM from Schneider Electric is designed to meet the needs of enterprises and their IT partners. From centralised data centres to edge computing deployments, EcoStruxure Data Center Solutions support the deployment and management of data centres to enable efficient management and reliability.

In addition, Schneider Electric has built cloud connectivity into the EcoStruxure platform to support vendor-neutral software and services. This makes it significantly easier to remotely track assets for around-the-clock monitoring. With data-driven insights, businesses can benchmark their systems against peers in their industry or across the board.

As enterprises face increasing pressure to demonstrate that their data centre investments are wisely invested with a good return on investment (ROI), the EcoStruxure platform is a tried-and-tested platform that can help enterprises deliver greater reliability and uptime in the face of the new world of work.

You can read more about the advantages of a data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) solution, or find out more about Schneider Electric's EcoStruxure platform here.