Schneider Electric Launches ‘Infrastruxure’ For IT In SMBs

Bangalore,India: According to Schneider, 34 million MSME enterprises contribute to 10% of India's GDP. They are responsible for 45% of manufacturing output and 40% of exports. Since they form such an important part of our economy, IT is the backbone on which they have to thrive on. To help such SMBs maintain energy-efficient and space-efficient IT operations, Schneider has announced the ISX package, which will include UPS,racks and cooling units from Schneider, with accountability and installation from just one vendor. According to Jaybalan Velayudhan(Director,Strategy & Business Development-IT Business), "Our ISX makes IT infrastructure simple,adaptable and affordable. This solution is meant for enterprises with less than 10 racks, who have small server rooms instead of huge data centers". When asked about the price points of the package, Velayudhan says "It's not about the front-up capex, but involves both capex and opex. We expect that a minimum of 20% of savings on TCO will impact most organizations who use our infrastructure".

When asked about whether SMB movement to cloud services will mean IT infrastructure will become redundant, Shrinivas Chebbi (VP,India & SAARC,Schneider) said that "Just because a business deploys on cloud doesn't make Infrastructure disappear in their premises. They still want to have a safe/secure IT setup to use cloud services and backup their critical data". He pointed out that company data is even more critical to SMBs than enterprises, because it is the source of the value they provide. We had a look at their "NetShelter CX 24U" box, which looked just like an inconspicuous closet, but is secure and soundproof, and has an low-noise exhaust fan module to cool the components.

NetBotz room monitor also provides monitoring of the server box, so that IT administrators can be apprised of critical changes in the temperature or environment. Schneider showed us a first-hand demo of their monitoring software, which provided surveillance as well as sensor statistics from a server room the US. Apart from this management software, they also showed off ‘Infrastruxure Designer', which is a data center designer that allows Schneider's racks to be added to a virtual room, along with cooling,UPS and other systems to provide a simulation of the design. There is a 3D view for customers to visualize their server room, and computations on the power consumption and supply needed.

We will update this piece soon with details on the basic pricing of this solution, as well as the variants of the solution being put up for sale