There is little question that data center growth has certain limitations. There are too many options that would not be well served by a full scale data center, and businesses are realizing that in an international business world is often important to be able to deliver localized resources that can be scaled appropriately to the market.

Schneider Electric has long offered complete modular data center designs ranging from full buildings to shipping container sized offerings. But after integrating with its 2014 acquisition AST Modular, it is now offering designs that can take a business right out to edge computing, offering single box and multi-rack configurations that can fit the micro and mini-data center needs of data center customers.

SmartBunker
SmartBunker – Schneider Electric

On the edge for the rest of us chickens…

Businesses are quickly realizing that between a growing worldwide customer base and the Internet of Things potentially adding millions of connected devices and users, it is going to be important to deliver computing power and storage wherever and whenever needed, in a fashion that does not negatively impact the end user experience with potential latency and connectivity issues. This means edge computing and the ability to deploy smaller scale, but highly reliable micro data centers will become more important. 

Schneider is now offering made to order micro data center designs under the name SmartBunker and SmartShelter. SmartBunker is available in three versions, each configured to the buyer’s specifications but with specific environmental optimizations. SmartBunker FX is the ruggedized design, able to be dropped into any practical environment, while SmartBunker SX is designed for the traditional computer room operation. In between we have Smartbunker CX, which is designed to go into a standard office environment. For harsh environments requiring a multi-rack solution, there is the SmartShelter product.

Using these designs a business could deploy the exact same IT configuration into a wide variety of environmentally different locations, allowing the company to deliver the same edge computing capabilities regardless of the conditions where the micro data center needed to be deployed.