New 'Intelligent Edge Data Center' will drive smart industries to the next level

• Global strategic partnership targets IoT environments in smart industries with high real-time data loads
• Joint solutions will allow easy and fast implementation of IT infrastructures with powerful edge datacenters (from single rack to turnkey-ready datacenter container)

Rittal announced a new global strategic partnership with Atos and Siemens to develop intelligent edge datacenter solutions for smart industries, smart cities, smart retail, energy & utilities, and public sectors.

The new ‘Intelligent Edge Data Center’ (IEDC) is a highly configurable datacenter solution that enables companies to process IoT data in real-time using solutions such as MindSphere®, the cloud-based, open IoT operating system from Siemens, the new BullSequana Edge computing server and the BullSequana S server from Atos, Atos Codex Cloud Industrial Supervision (CIS) and thus optimize their entire value chain with an advanced data-, analytics solution.

The OT Infrastructure is developed by Rittal and is designed as an edge datacenter: One of the resulting improvements lies in the direct operation at the point of data generation to allow real-time processing of IoT data to enable faster analytics of streaming data and improved industry automation. From the IT perspective, Atos and Siemens’ software applications for IoT and Edge solutions will serve for data collection, computation and data analytics.

Solution for Edge Computing

The IEDC is available in different performance classes, from a wall box or a single IT rack up to a powerful turnkey-ready and scalable datacenter container.

The IEDC is ideal for companies that have already started the digital transformation and need to process large amounts of real-time data in smart production environments or other areas. Further application examples can be found in industries ranging from smart retail to smart healthcare but also in smart cities or in the expansion of 5G mobile networks in which the IEDC can carry out data processing directly at the mobile base station.

The IEDC solution in detail

The IEDC is a secure, highly standardized, industrialized solution. It can run autonomously in non-datacenter environments and there is no need for a white room nor for local IT teams to operate it. The solution comes with Siemens’ MindSphere readiness (an IoT operating system by Siemens) to benefit from IoT dedicated applications both in the cloud or on-premise. It supports the MindSphere architecture running in a cloud-based or an on-premise implementation.

The IEDC embeds the BullSequana Edge server for computer vision and IoT datalake from Atos, Atos Codex CIS software which forms the IoT backbone, but it enables also to inter-connect several other sensors within a single IEDC. The IEDC could be inter-connected to establish a swarm as a meshed edge datacenter network. This enables the progressive deployment of advanced business applications and solutions. The relevant data of each node of the network is available on top-level dashboards used for a deep insight by monitoring, controlling and optimization using advanced analytics.

The following list shows which components are supplied by the individual partners:

• Atos: IT infrastructure such as BullSequana Edge, BullSequana S, Atos Codex CIS, MindSphere (Apps), Atos Business Applications & Services, Predictive Maintenance, 3^rd -party AI applications and overall supervision.
• Rittal: OT Infrastructure such as edge datacenter, power, cooling, basic monitoring and safety and housing.
• Siemens: Technical infrastructure such as advanced monitoring and safety, power protection, security and IT-infrastructure like building management system and MindSphere (platform & apps).

“The Intelligent Edge Data Center developed in partnership with Rittal and Siemens is part of Atos’ Edge strategy to move the compute of large amounts of more and more complex data close to the location where they are generated: factories, shops, airports and hospitals. By combining the IT hardware and software developed by Atos and Siemens, together with the infrastructure from Rittal, we’re offering a very successful solution to accelerate customers’ journeys to efficient and powerful IoT Data analytics.” said Emmanuel Le Roux, Senior Vice President, Big Data, Atos.

“The exponential volume of data with heterogonous complexity is putting any kind of organization and industry in front of a massive digital revolution. Only the ones, which will have smart edge infrastructures, enabling compute close to data sources, as extension of cloud infrastructure, will secure their path to sustainable economic or social growth.“, says Bertrand Delatte Head of Data Center Solutions Europe at Siemens.

“The realisation of the digital transformation requires a broad expertise across different competencies. Only a team of technology and competence leaders is capable of developing a truly intelligent and plug-and-play-ready Edge Data Center solution that enables the rapid development of new IT infrastructures”, comments Andreas Keiger, Executive Vice President, Business Unit IT, Rittal.

Availability

The IEDC is available globally from third quarter 2019 onwards, with a strong focus on EMEA and the USA in the first months.

As general contractor, Atos will market the solution as part of its Digital Factory and Smart Infrastructure competence areas.