Rittal, ABB, and HPE Unveil Secure Edge Data Center to Drive Digitalization of Industrial Plants

August 12, 2019

Rittal, global leader for industrial enclosures, climate control, power management systems, and automation services, partnered with ABB and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to provide turnkey resilient micro-modular datacenters purpose-built for rough environments, which help customers turn data into action in real time.

At Hannover Messe, Rittal, ABB and HPE unveiled the Secure Edge Data Center (SEDC) for industrial and telecommunications environments. This allows customers to run enterprise-grade IT in close proximity to their operational technology environments, machines and equipment to enable low-latency, secure and reliable digital processes.

“According to industry-leading research organizations, the amount of enterprise-generated data that is created and processed outside of traditional central data centers or the cloud is going to grow from the current 10 percent to 50 percent by 2022,” said Kevin Nusky, director of data center solutions at Rittal North America. “The growth rate will continue to expand and be spurred on by 5G and the ongoing convergence of operational technology and IT.”

Responding to this demand, the SEDC provides a turnkey and resilient data center environment optimized 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 significantly simplifies the deployment of enterprise-grade IT solutions in industrial environments regardless of their location. It helps customers:

• Get started quickly. SEDC is delivered as a factory-integrated and tested turnkey solution, fully equipped with pre-configured HPE software-defined infrastructure, the SEDC is ready to operate within 12 weeks.
• Secure their 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 easily expandable in steps of 5, 10 and 20 kW to support increasing IT workloads.
• Digitize their industrial environments cost-efficiently and with economic flexibility. The SEDC provides enterprise data center functionality 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 specialized 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 center, as well as in the Microsoft Azure public cloud – to meet their specific requirements regarding performance, security or cross-site collaboration.

For more information on the SEDC, visit www.rittal.us/contents/edge-computing-and-uncontrolled-environments.