Schneider Electric and Cisco have announced pre-integrated hyperconverged micro data centres for the edge, combining Schneider Electric’s physical infrastructure with Cisco’s HCI HyperFlex Edge infrastructure
Whether or not you take Gartner predictions as golden, Schneider Electric is listening to the analyst house’s prediction that 75 percent of data will be processed at the edge by 2025, compared to 10 percent today. Accordingly, it is wasting no time in shifting its data centre strategy to the edge, which it divides into the local and regional edge.
Its micro data centres are made with the local edge in mind, built for branch offices such as retail stores, or on-premise public cloud stacks in local offices, for local processing of data.
The three reference designs announced are CX for offices, SX for standard IT spaces and FX for harsh environments.
Options
The three new reference designs are customisable according to UPS, PDU, security and size requirements. Schneider Electric’s global IT Partners can now use the Local Edge Configurator software to gauge costing for office/IT scenarios.
The two companies said the designs represent flexible, resilient and speedy deployments for the local edge that are “remotely monitorable and physically secure.”
‘Holy grail of edge compute’
Asked about the demand for hyperconverged edge solutions, Ram Srinivisan, Cisco Systems cited IDC’s prediction that the entire HCI market will be worth 8.3 billion by 2022 and said the “vast majority” of Cisco’s HyperFlex infrastructure is rolling out to edge deployments.
Scott San Antonio, director of alliances at Schneider Electric, added “hyperconverged is the purest form of edge compute.”
Both companies predict that as IT infrastructure becomes increasingly edge-based enterprises will need to be able to quickly and easily order powerful pre-integrated, optimised, small-scale infrastructure to their various edge sites on demand.
“As the needs for edge compute continue to evolve and the marketplace demands plug-and-play solutions that put the specific needs of the customer front and centre, new solutions like this micro data centre solution with Cisco HyperFlex Edge will be key for success,” said Vijay Venugopal, senior director, HyperFlex product management, Cisco.
