Rittal forms global strategic partnership with Atos and Siemens for Edge and IoT initiatives

Rittal has formed a new global strategic partnership with Atos and Siemens to develop intelligent edge data centre solutions for smart industries, smart cities, smart retail, energy and utility companies, and public sector organisations.

The new ‘Intelligent Edge Data Centre’ (IEDC) is a highly configurable, data centre 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, plus the new BullSequana Edge computing server and the BullSequana S server from Atos, Atos Codex Cloud Industrial Supervision (CIS) - thus optimising their entire value chain with an advanced, data-analytics solution.

The OT Infrastructure has been developed by Rittal and is designed as an edge data centre. One of the resulting improvements lies in the direct operation at the point of data generation to allow real-time processing of IoT data for faster analysis of streaming data and improved industry automation.

Meanwhile, Atos’s and Siemens’ software applications for IoT and Edge solutions will together manage the 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 data centre container.

The IEDC is ideal for companies that have already started the process of digital transformation, and therefore need to process large amounts of real-time data in smart production environments or other areas. 

The technology can be applied across a range of sectors, from smart retail to smart healthcare, as well as in smart cities and to facilitate the expansion of 5G mobile networks by processing data right at the base of the mobile station.

The IEDC solution in detail

The IEDC is a secure, highly standardized, industrialized solution. It can run autonomously in non-data centre environments and there is no need either for a white room or for local IT teams to operate it. It is delivered Mindsphere-ready and can run IoT-dedicated applications either in the cloud or on premises.

The IEDC embeds a BullSequana Edge server for computer vision and IoT datalake from Atos, Atos Codex CIS software, which then forms the IoT backbone, but it can also interconnect several other sensors within a single IEDC.

The IEDC can also be interconnected to establish a swarm as a meshed edge data centre network. This enables the progressive deployment of advanced business applications and solutions. The relevant data of each node of the network is available within top-level dashboards used for a deep insight by monitoring, controlling and optimisation 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, 3rd -party AI applications and overall supervision.

• Rittal: OT Infrastructure such as edge data centre, 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 and apps).

Emmanuel Le Roux, Senior Vice President, Big Data, Atos, says, “The Intelligent Edge Data Center developed in partnership with Rittal and Siemens is part of Atos’s 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.”

Bertrand Delatte Head of Data Center Solutions Europe at Siemens, advises, “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 that 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.“

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