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There’s no doubt that cloud deployments were vastly accelerated in 2020. As the cloud takes root across industries, something else is happening simultaneously. Next-gen, latency-sensitive applications are pushing more compute to the edge — spurring a rapid emergence of edge ecosystems. These ‘outer edges’ of today’s vast enterprises — made up of remote and geographically distributed sites drive the need for better edge infrastructure management solutions.
The sheer high-volume of data generated at the edge pushes the uptake of decentralized computing. In a hyper-connected, digitalized world, applications are routing internet traffic to the nearest exit point to eliminate unnecessary latency. But the answer to the future of edge computing doesn’t just lie in micro data centers alone. Uptime and resilience of remote, distributed edge deployments increasingly hinge on dependable automation solutions that lend end-to-end visibility into your networked critical infrastructure assets.
In other words, the critical physical infrastructure, such as power, cooling assets and the infrastructure to house and manage these devices that enable disruption-free functioning of the expanding edge computing ecosystem. The cost-effective and efficient management and maintenance of these systems pose unique challenges to IT leaders, who need to manage expanding network architectures without committing additional personnel on the ground.
Intelligent Automation Is Key to Resilience in the Edge Era
While energy power is often taken for granted, nothing operates in its absence. IT leaders are often less likely to pay attention to the uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), power distribution units (PDUs), rack access, and cooling equipment that power extended edge sites and help enterprises operate seamlessly. But eliminating points of failure across hybrid IT infrastructure is critical for flexible, efficient business operations. For example, extreme temperature, humidity and faulty equipment can cripple mission-critical applications and ground them to a halt.
On factory floors, frequent downtime can lead to lost production and translate into revenue loss. Adding new hardware or holding on to aging equipment can rack up operational costs. Expanding the physical device footprint also puts a significant strain on the IT team’s ability to safeguard assets. Intelligent automation can play a pivotal role in reducing device footprint and meet the increasingly dynamic needs of ever-evolving business environments. However, not all automation solutions are created equal.
The industry is awash in remote monitoring and managementOpens a new window (RMM) tools that only offer visibility into specific physical infrastructure. In the search for effective monitoring, IT leaders tend to invest in multiple remote monitoring solutions that add to the noise, alert fatigue and lead to vendor lock-in. This can also create technical obstacles for remote IT teams that are tasked with system resiliency across dispersed sites.
Designing resilient architectures at the edge must start with intelligent vendor-agnostic remote monitoring solutions that integrate with third-party platforms and generate insights down to the device-level to effectively minimize unplanned downtime.
Edge-Enabled Monitoring Vital for Today’s Educational Institutions
Nowhere is the criticality of edge infrastructure more apparent than the education sector. Today’s schools are the new edge sites that demand the same visibility and monitoring capabilitiesOpens a new window as any other business. Colleges and universities are no exception. In addition to large classroom buildings, campuses today consist of data centers, sports facilities, and research facilities, not to mention rapidly expanding ‘distributed’ and ‘virtual’ footprints.
All of them depend on high-tech infrastructures that must run flawlessly. If a single piece of equipment goes down, learning stops. These diverse sites, unfortunately, were not built for cohesive infrastructure management. While each site would have different energy and cooling needs, they are often designed and administered independently from one another. As a result, these siloed systems host incompatible infrastructure that operates in isolation, resulting in the inability to share performance data across the facility’s entire plane.
IT needs consistent data about the underlying IT systems to manage them effectively. Without understanding what is happening in real-time across distributed edge deployments, IT personnel cannot guarantee performance and uptime for ongoing education and training. Besides monitoring the underlying energy ecosphere beneath the IT infrastructure, IT administrators also require the necessary diagnostic and management tools to oversee that power and cooling systems run optimally and avoid unexpected outages. In the event of an outage, education facilities that lack on-site IT support risk hardware damage, sensitive data loss, and extended downtime that impacts learning timelines.
To provide environments conducive to learning without disruption, IT decision makers at progressive and forward-looking educational institutions must treat each distributed branch of the system with the same level of diligence and attention as the central office, even without fully-staffed IT teams at each remote location. Technology leaders who have done this understand that automation by itself isn’t the only solution. For remote monitoring to work intelligently, the software should integrate with existing tools, organize infrastructure devices by geography or customizable locations, deliver meaningful incident events to any device (laptop or smartphone), slash response times, and simplify the maintenance and management of physical equipment. Plus, the intelligent automation solution should leave headroom for IT teams to drill down into the source of the alert, remediate the issue and maximize uptime.
It’s time to apply a new approach to edge infrastructure management in the education industry. That is why robust, vendor-neutral remote monitoring and management solutions such as the industry-leading EcoStruxure IT Expert are fast-becoming a must for edtech leaders in today’s high-tech education industry.
Take Advantage of Software-Centric Automation With EcoStruxure IT Expert
The industry’s first cloud-based Data Centre Infrastructure ManagementOpens a new window (DCIM) solution, EcoStruxure IT ExpertOpens a new window , from pioneering technology company Schneider Electric, can play a central role in edge infrastructure management for undisrupted IT operations.
The next-generation EcoStruxure IT Expert brings new transformative capabilities that fuse interoperability with third-party and proprietary technology platforms to deliver insights at a fine-grained level across distributed edge environments.
The solution acts as an anchor point for all hybrid IT equipment and provides a centralized, vendor-agnostic monitoring platform to gain real-time visibility into physical IT infrastructure. Through customizable dashboards, admins can fully manage remote devices, including UPSsOpens a new window , PDUsOpens a new window , rack accessOpens a new window and cooling equipmentOpens a new window . In addition to visibility and monitoring, EcoStruxure IT Expert can supply actionable notifications to help IT identify potential issues with faulty devices before they become critical. It also provides information necessary to implement proactive IT maintenance and replacement procedures.
Some of the enhanced capabilities of EcoStruxure IT Expert include:
- Leverages analytics and machine learning to determine optimized behavior patterns and identify potential problems and risks across distributed IT sites.
- Benchmarking allows IT teams to compare the performance of their devices against the total inventory of similar devices across geographically distributed locations to optimize operations.
- Deliver real-time incident events and updates with AI to any device while avoiding meaningless alerts.
- Optimizes and simplifies hybrid device management, allowing IT teams to proactively address security vulnerabilities and apply bug fixes in real-time.
- The public API allows IT teams to integrate the monitoring platform into their preferred systems and build applications for business growth.
While EcoStruxure IT Expert is vendor-neutral, it fully integrates with the APC Smart-UPS solution suite and builds upon its flexible array of features. The enterprise SaaS application offers an intuitive remote management interface that gives local admins the ability to receive automatic notifications, firmware updates, and advanced support 24×7 to deliver a seamless service experience for continued learning initiatives.
Extending the Visibility at the Edge Can Chip Away at Unnecessary Costs
Though most of the industry buzz is focused around cloud-first approaches, the cloud now exists alongside distributed edge sitesOpens a new window that deliver economic efficiencies, scalability, and flexibility to power business operations. While edtech leaders are bringing operations up-to-speed with the cloud, they often fail to extend the same virtualization layer over the cooling and power infrastructure — critical components for ‘keeping the lights on’ in the edge sites. Educational institutions walking a tightrope between trimming costs and scaling up should know that only process simplification can help them meet growing business demands.
Today’s educational facilities deliver increasingly digital services — think one-to-one laptop initiatives, virtual reality, and data-driven digital learning curriculums, distributed and virtual classrooms-in-the-cloud. IT’s mandateOpens a new window is to maintain continuous availability and uptime of these digital interfaces while ensuring the safety of the hardware’s data and smooth performance.
In the event of a power outage, teachers become frustrated, students’ work can be lost and equipment can get damaged. While digital modernization is a great way to automate remote maintenance and management, optimize capacity planning, and mitigate unplanned downtime — technology decision-makers shouldn’t just commit to the first solution on the market that touts automation chops unless they are certain about its flexibility and ability to integrate with their existing systems.
Scalable, plug-and-play real-time monitoring technologies like EcoStruxure IT Expert address these constraints head-on by centralizing device management across all edge sites from the same interface. This improves operational efficiency and ensures uptime at a lower cost. Plus, with predictive analytics, IT executives have the opportunity to convert IT asset management overheads into a business advantage, leveraging operational data to drive autonomous operations. In a rapidly evolving business environment, deploying the right remote monitoring and management technology can help you build leaner operations, safeguard critical physical infrastructure from cyber threats and rise above the competition in the education industry.
To learn more about how Schneider Electric can help you manage distributed edge deployments – visit this pageOpens a new window for more information.