Planning for the future, Schneider Electric continues to focus on ways to help customers use its Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software for the most resilient, secure and sustainable IT infrastructure anywhere.
Now is the perfect time for customers to reflect on the challenges they encountered in the past year, as they navigated the complex world of hybrid IT. How has the EcoStruxure IT team made their IT infrastructure more resilient, secure and sustainable?
Schneider Electric has made significant improvements and added new features to its on-premise and cloud-based products, to simplify operations and enhance resiliency for customers. Some of these enhancements include:
- Alarm Threshold Policies in IT Expert: Users can create advanced criteria for setting alarms, such as sending an alarm if the temperature exceeds 25 degrees above normal for more than 30 minutes. This helps reduce the number of overall alarms and makes them more targeted.
- Service Contracts and Visits Widget: Now available on the IT Expert dashboard, this widget provides a quick overview of all devices and their service contract status, updated weekly.
- Windows Event Logging for PowerChute: This allows system-level logging and centralising event monitoring. Syslog support has also been added for larger enterprises to send logs to a central Syslog Server.
- Extended PowerChute vCLS Support: This now includes all UPS configurations, providing flexibility if shutting down all hosts in a cluster is not necessary.
- LDAP on the Network Management Card (NMC): Users can set up the device to use an LDAP server to authenticate remote users, such as Microsoft Active Directory and OpenLDAP.
- Remote Command Execution via SSH: PowerChute Network Shutdown can execute commands on a remote system, which is useful for managing storage arrays or similar systems that need to be shut down gracefully.
- Consolidation of Data Centre Expert Syslogs: This makes managing system-level logging easier.
These enhancements have boosted the resiliency of IT infrastructure, making it more efficient and simpler to operate.
Naturally, cybersecurity remains a top concern for businesses, and maintaining secure IT infrastructure is increasingly complex. Schneider Electric has stepped in to help with several key improvements, elevating cybersecurity to the next level while making it easier to manage and apply updates:
- Mass Configuration Option in IT Expert: Users can connect and change IDs and passwords of all devices simultaneously and remotely in the cloud.
- Secure Protocol in Data Centre Expert: The communications protocol between the device and DCE has been upgraded from SNMPv1 to SNMPv3, enhancing security at the press of a button.
- IEC Certification for EcoStruxure IT NMC Platform: The NMC obtained IEC 62443-4-2 Security Level 2 (SL2) designation, making it the first DCIM NMC to achieve this level of cybersecurity certification.
- ISASecure® SDLA Compliance: Development processes were certified as ISASecure® Secure Development Lifecycle Assurance (SDLA) compliant.
- EcoStruxure IT Secure NMC System (SNS): This offers improved embedded firmware management, making the process of researching and installing the latest firmware up to 90% faster.
One of the most exciting developments of 2024 was the introduction of new model-based, automated sustainability reporting features in the EcoStruxure IT portfolio. These allow organisations to quickly quantify and report sustainability metrics at the click of a button, removing laborious manual tasks and harnessing the power of data to reduce the environmental impact of data centres.
The new reporting features were made available to all EcoStruxure IT users in April, ahead of the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) going into effect.
As Alison Matte, EcoStruxure IT Sustainability Lead, told Data Centre Solutions Magazine, “Sustainability is a way to limit energy consumption, reduce costs related to energy, and reduce waste in data centres where all these IT assets are being managed.”
At Schneider Electric, the Green IT project with the CIO team drove changes, resulting in new sustainability reporting metrics that are user-friendly and comprehensive.
As Schneider Electric looks to the future, the EcoStruxure IT team will continue to build on this year’s success. It is understood that the hybrid IT environment will grow in complexity, especially as AI makes its mark on data centres. The focus will remain on supporting and guiding customers to meet these challenges, ensuring they have the most resilient, secure and sustainable IT infrastructure anywhere.
Discover more innovations and resources by visiting the Schneider Electric Partner Hub today.
