ABB, HP and Rittal to jointly drive industrial digitisation

ABB, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Rittal have announced Secure Edge Data Center (SEDC) for industrial and telecommunications environments. 

This will allow customers to run enterprise-grade IT in close proximity to their operational technology (OT) environments, machines and equipment to enable low-latency, secure and reliable digital processes.

Currently, around 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralised data centre or cloud, according to Gartner. By 2022, this figure will reach 50%, predicts Gartner. Also, the market for so-called micromodular data centres is growing rapidly. 

Responding to this demand, the solution provides a turnkey and resilient data centre environment optimised to operate in harsh environments. It enables customers to run data acquisition, analytics and control processes near industrial equipment to avoid the latency, security and reliability issues associated with data communication through remote IT systems.

The SEDC is said to simplify the deployment of enterprise-grade IT solutions in industrial environments regardless of their location. It helps customers achieve the following:

• Get started quickly — Delivered as a factory-integrated and tested turnkey solution, fully equipped with preconfigured HPE software-defined infrastructure, the SEDC is ready to operate within 12 weeks.
• Secure digital processes — An IP55-rated enclosure physically protects against humidity, dust and dirt, with integrated cooling and fire suppression from Rittal and redundant power supply from ABB with backup power.
• Easily scale their environment — The SEDC is expandable in steps of 5, 10 and 20 kW to support increasing IT workloads.
• Digitise industrial environments cost-efficiently and with economic flexibility — Enterprise data centre functionality is provided on the footprint of a standard IT rack, with flexible financing options such as consumption-based pricing.
• Avoid downtime and on-site operations effort — The SEDC and its infrastructure can be remotely monitored and managed across all customer locations to ensure high availability without requiring specialised staff on-site.

By equipping the SEDC with hybrid platforms such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, customers can deploy Azure-consistent applications to their preferred location, on HPE infrastructure in the SEDC or a data centre, as well as in the Microsoft Azure public cloud, to meet their specific requirements regarding performance, security or cross-site collaboration.

The Secure Edge Data Center was unveiled at Hannover Messe 2018.

“ABB is very conscious that when our customers start their journey for new digital services and enter initiatives like IoT and Industry 4.0, they need a secure and stable infrastructure close to the operations. Our Secure Edge Data Center is providing them with those capabilities with an off-the-shelf proven data centre solution,” said Ciarán Flanagan, head of Global Data Center Segment at ABB.