Schneider Electric and Aveva announce solution for multi-site data center management

Schneider Electric has partnered with systems management company Aveva to put together a package for managing multiple and hyperscale data centers with a single view to enable and expand visibility into day-to-day operations.

The package combines Aveva Unified Operations Center with Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure for control and monitoring systems to offer predictive maintenance, staff training and financial aspects of large data centers. The combined software provides a homogenous view of engineering, operations and performance and improves workforce productivity by standardizing and de-siloing systems and processes across multiple sites for real-time decision making.

Schneider’s EcoStruxure is a suite of tools and services to help users implement IoT. It simplifies collection of data from intelligent devices using standard communications protocols and shares that data with a variety of applications, such as analytics and services. So the melding of the two products combines industrial equipment monitoring with IoT device management.

With data-center providers building data centers around the world, maintaining the facilities gets tough and usually they have to be managed individually. The new joint platform works across heterogenous legacy installed bases and connects operators to platforms and data sets that previously existed in disparate systems.

The platforms will also be able to scale regardless of number of sites or global locations. So providers can deliver a consistent experience to address the expanding digital infrastructure needs of their clients, the two firms claim. The features in Aveva’s software include predictive analytics and learning, which can receive data from related modules in Schneider’s EcoStruxure.

“The solution can take data that has long been managed at individual data centers, often in siloed sub-systems, normalize it across multiple sites and can ultimately inform and provide enterprise level IT/OT/IoT integration to deliver real-time decision making. The complete solution will deliver operational efficiency and a more reliable data center fleet,” says Pankaj Sharma, executive vice president of the secure power division at Schneider Electric in a statement.   

Aveva started as a computer-aided design developer but expanded into other areas of industrial software, including digital transformation, asset performance and monitoring. In 2015, Schneider Electric bought a 53 percent stake in the company, but left it operating independently with its own CEO.