Managed Power-as-a-Service Part 2: Reliable and resilient, supported power at the edge

The rise of edge computing is highlighting how future data architectures are likely to be more distributed, across a greater number of applications and in a broader spectrum of locations.

Ensuring these deployments are as well supported as data infrastructure within the data centre is key to allowing organisations to get the best from the new capabilities.

A managed power service gives organisations the same peace of mind for the power behind an edge or remote deployment as it does for entire IT service, based on compute, storage, and network resources.

New paradigm

Edge computing has been recognised as a key architecture to allow organisations to deploy increasingly important technologies such as remote sensors, industrial IoT and data processing close to where operations occur. This allows organisations to perform analytics at source for immediate insights, before sending data to the central Data Centre IT consolidation point, reducing bandwidth, and improving performance.

While the means to monitor and actively manage the compute, storage, and network resources has been around for quite some time, supporting the remote power infrastructure behind edge deployments and remote micro data centres has not been so easy. However, as organisations increasingly rely on compute resources closer to where data is generated, the ability to support the power resources behind such deployments has become paramount.

A managed service from a trusted partner, built on the expertise of the industry leader, make sense for the new paradigm.

MPS Practice

The Edge Software and Digital Services Program from Schneider Electric allows the trusted partner network to create a Managed Power Services practice that supports the power infrastructure behind remote and edge computing deployments to the same levels as compute, storage, and network resources. The programme includes a complete suite of benefits, support tools and certifications that enables IT solution providers to create a trusted support service.

The service providers have access to a wide range of tools, resources and insights from Schneider Electric, providing further reassurance to service users.

With services informed by decades of experience in supporting service providers within the wider information technology ecosystem, the managed power service leverages best practice from partnering organisations of all sizes across diverse deployments, bringing new levels of support for remote and distributed power resources.

Advanced supports

Service providers can deliver advanced 24/7 remote monitoring and remote/on-site support. Schneider Electric’s digital services portfolio is enabled by its EcoStruxure IT Platform, which supports successful deployment, monitoring, and maintenance at the edge.

The IT solution providers can pick up software and digital services to build a solution that best suits users’ needs. These systems can adapt to individual patterns of usage and utilisation, giving greater insights for further refinement and improvement of services.

The services are flexible and can scale with the support needs of organisations beginning with first deployments or expanding to existing services. That scalability is vital in today’s environment to meet surges in demand driven by increasingly unpredictable market conditions.

A key benefit of active monitoring is that it facilitates a predictive maintenance capability. Instead of handling faults, an MPS allows operators to closely monitor systems and equipment to identify failure points and allow mitigation actions before a failure. Service providers can allow operators to enjoy greater resilience and continuity by predicting and preventing failures. This is possible due to intelligence derived from the intelligent monitoring systems for power, ensuring power infrastructure, wherever deployed, performs the same level of other critical systems. As an example, one customer from the retail industry improved store availability by 88%. After implementing MPS average active UPS faults decreased from 70 to 10 and more than 5 600 hours of staff hours started allocated back to customer-facing engagement instead of troubleshooting.

Issues addressed

The MPS also address issues around remote access and skills for users and operators, who are more likely to have the expertise for compute resources than for power infrastructure.

MPS users can leverage not just the expertise of the service provider, but through the back-up and infrastructure of Schneider Electric, enjoy insights for utilisation, reliability and resilience that can feedback into resource management and orchestration.

Extending this kind of service model to a power service means that organisations do not need to be concerned with recruiting specialist personnel. Instead, the service provider can, through its intelligent monitoring systems, make informed decisions as to when a hands on intervention is necessary. When such action is required, the service provider can deploy the right skills at the right time, further ensuring continuity of service and resilience, as well as efficiency.

Confident support

A managed power service can allow users of all sizes to confidently support the power infrastructure behind remote and edge deployments as easily as they would all other aspects of operation.

Through a trusted network of providers, leveraging an industry leading set of resources and insights, new capabilities can be confidently embraced through assured management, flexibility and resilience.