“In an increasingly digitised and data-driven world, the challenge of providing high levels of computer power, connectivity and availability to where it is needed most, requires a hybrid architecture of centralised and edge datacentres.
This is according to George Senzere, pre-sales manager: Anglophone ITD global at Schneider Electric South Africa, who adds: “While providing many great benefits to users across industrial, enterprise and retail consumer environments, edge data centres also present several challenges in terms of how they are built, deployed and managed.
“Due to their distributed nature and the growing number of deployments, edge sites are often unmanned and lack available IT staff, which makes them hard to manage efficiently, while ensuring low service and maintenance costs.
“What is needed is a new, emerging model that involves an integrated ecosystem of cooperative partners, vendors and end users,” he adds. “This ecosystem and the integrated micro data centre solution it produces, helps mitigate the unique challenges of edge applications by selecting, deploying and maintaining edge computer solutions that are much easier and more cost effective for end-users.
“This 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 in specific ways to simplify, accelerate and ensure resiliency at the edge.
“The ecosystem works for the end user by monitoring and maintaining all edge assets, while delivering greater levels of uptime and cost-effectiveness for the end user. The ecosystem, in effect, becomes the extended workforce of the end user.
“The responsibility of the vendors is to create simple tools to guide the selection and configuration of data centres, which are optimised for specific customer applications,” Senzere says. “Whether in retail, industrial or commercial consumer environments, vendors should test and optimise solutions, providing reference designs and systems that allow rapid integration of hardware and software management tools.
“Additionally, today’s businesses must rely on cloud-based management software, namely data centre management as a service (DMaaS) solutions, such as Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT and on-premise data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools, to manage multiple edge data centres efficiently in real-time.
“Using a combination of pre-integrated hardware solutions, in addition to cloud-based software, can reduce field engineering costs by between 25% and 40%, while increasing uptime and availability.
“Overall, a collaborative ecosystem of vendors, partners, software and tools should be chosen to augment a customer’s edge computing requirements; from configuration to assembly and delivery, through to operation, management and maintenance.”
Schneider Electric has released a new White Paper entitled ‘Solving Edge Computing Infrastructure Challenges’, creating a structure for anticipating potential issues at the edge and details how to identify an ecosystem of partners with which to collaborate, integrate and deliver the entire essential infrastructure components required.