ABB, HPE and Rittal unveil Secure Edge Data Center to drive digitization of Industrial Plants

ABB, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Rittal will unveil the Secure Edge Data Center (SEDC) for industrial and telecommunications environments at Hannover Messe.  This will allow customers to run enterprise-grade IT in close proximity to their operational technology (OT) environments, machines and equipment to enable low-latency, secure and reliable digital processes.

The SEDC provides a turnkey and resilient data center environment optimized to operate in harsh environments.  It enables customers to run data acquisition, analytics and control processes near industrial equipment to avoid the latency, security and reliability issues associated with data communication through remote IT systems.

Edge Data Center Helps Customers

The SEDC significantly simplifies the deployment of enterprise-grade IT solutions in industrial environments regardless of their location.  It helps customers:

• get started quickly – delivered as a factory-integrated and tested turnkey solution, fully equipped with pre-configured HPE software-defined infrastructure, the SEDC is ready to operate within twelve weeks
• secure their digital processes – an IP55-rated The IP Code, International Protection Marking, IEC standard 60529, classifies and rates the degree of protection provided against intrusion, dust, accidental contact, and water by mechanical casings and electrical enclosures.  It is published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).  The equivalent European standard is EN 60529. enclosure, physically protecting against humidity, dust and dirt, with integrated cooling and fire suppression from Rittal and redundant power supply from ABB with backup power
• easily scale their environment – the SEDC is easily expandable in steps of 5, 10 and 20 kW to support increasing IT workloads
• digitize their industrial environments cost-efficiently and with economic flexibility – by providing enterprise data center functionality on the footprint of a standard IT rack, with flexible financing options such as consumption-based pricing
• avoid downtime and on-site operations effort – the SEDC and its infrastructure can be remotely monitored and managed across all customer locations to ensure high availability without requiring specialized staff on site

By equipping the SEDC with hybrid platforms, such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, customers can deploy Azure-consistent applications to their preferred location – on HPE infrastructure in the SEDC or a data center, as well as in the Microsoft Azure public cloud – to meet their specific requirements regarding performance, security or cross-site collaboration.

The Secure Edge Data Center is available in Europe in September 2018.

Harry Forbes, ARC Advisory Group, commented, “The concept underlying the Secure Edge Data Center (SEDC) fits in well with the Open Process Automation Forum work envisioned by ExxonMobil and The Open Group, of which ABB is a member.  Besides serving as host for plant/unit servers, an SEDC is capable of hosting as much real-time automation functionality as suppliers and end users are willing to allocate to it”.