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By Kevin Brown
With the new year around the corner, the EcoStruxure IT team is planning for 2025, and continuing to focus on ways to help our customers use our Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software for the most resilient, secure, and sustainable IT infrastructure anywhere.
In my opinion, this 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.
And I have one more challenge for our customers. I want them to ask us how we have helped their organizations in the past year. How has the EcoStruxure IT team made their IT infrastructure more resilient, secure, and sustainable? In other words, what have we done for you lately?
Steady stream of updates and enhancements for improved resiliency
I want to answer that question by highlighting some of the accomplishments of the past year and sharing our outlook for 2025. Our team has made improvements and added new features to our on-premise and cloud-based products to help make operations simpler and more resilient for our customers. A sample of these improvements and additions includes:
- Alarm threshold policies in IT Expert that allow you to create advanced criteria for setting alarms, such as sending an alarm if the temperature is 25 degrees over normal for more than 30 minutes. This functionality helps reduce the number of overall alarms and makes they more targeted.
- “Service Contracts and Visits” is now a widget on the dashboard for IT Expert. It gives a simple and quick overview of all devices and lets you know if they are under service contract. The information is updated weekly. Before this improvement, you had to reach out and ask.
- Windows event logging for PowerChute to allow system-level logging: the windows event log covers everything around the system and centralizes it for easier event monitoring. We also added Syslog support for larger enterprises that want to send their logs to a central Syslog Server.
- We extended PowerChute vCLS support to all UPS configurations providing flexibility if you don’t need to shut down all hosts in your cluster.
- LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) on the Network Management Card (NMC): You can set up the device to use an LDAP server to authenticate remote users. Two common examples of this are Microsoft Active Directory and OpenLDAP.
- PowerChute Network Shutdown can be configured to execute commands on a remote system such as a storage array or back-up server via an SSH connection. This can be useful for managing storage arrays or similar systems that may need to be shut down gracefully along with the rest of the equipment.
- Consolidation of Data Center Expert Syslogs from different systems to make managing system-level logging easier.
So, what have we done for you lately? We offered a steady flow of product enhancements and new features designed to boost the resiliency of your IT infrastructure and help it be more efficient and simpler to operate.
Continued improvement on cybersecurity features
While cybersecurity has long been a focus of our industry, businesses now consider it a top concern. Maintaining secure IT infrastructure is challenging work and it is only becoming more complex. That is where our team steps in to help.
Imagine having thousands of UPSs and racks, each with its own password that you need to keep secure. It might be difficult, perhaps impossible, not to fall behind. IT Expert now has a mass configuration option to connect and change IDs and passwords of all devices at the same time and do it remotely in the cloud.
Similarly, we now offer a more secure protocol in Data Center Expert, having changed the communications protocol between the device and DCE from SNMPv1 to SNMPv3 at the flip of a button – a request from our customers that we were happy to make happen.
We announced earlier this year that our EcoStruxure IT NMC platform had been independently certified to standards set by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). In October, we announced an industry first: our NMC obtained a new and higher level of cybersecurity certification, making it the first DCIM NMC to achieve IEC 62443-4-2 Security Level 2 (SL2) designation from the IEC.
Our focus on cybersecurity is strong and the new level of independent certification ensures that vendor products designed for data center and distributed IT environments meet a set of well-defined security requirements and undergo thorough testing and assessment. To add to our announcement, we also had our development processes certified as ISASecure® Secure Development Lifecycle Assurance (SDLA) compliant.
We also know that companies are challenged to keep up with firmware updates and the EcoStruxure IT Secure NMC System (SNS) offers improved embedded firmware management thanks to a new dedicated tool. The SNS Tool transforms the cumbersome process of researching and installing the latest firmware on all devices, making the process up to 90% faster.
So, what have we done for you lately? We elevated our cybersecurity to the next level with new enhancements and dual certifications, and we made it easier to manage and apply updates.
New model based, automated sustainability reporting
One of the most exciting developments of 2024 happened early in the year when the EcoStruxure IT team introduced a winning way to help customers on the sustainability front with new model based, automated sustainability reporting features in our EcoStruxure IT portfolio. The breakthrough features allow organizations to quickly quantify and report sustainability metrics at the click of a button. We have removed laborious manual tasks, making it faster and easier to harness the power of data to reduce the environmental impact of data centers. Of course we are providing this functionality with the help of AI.
The new and enhanced reporting features, which were welcomed by the industry, were made available to all EcoStruxure IT users in April, prior to the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) going into effect. As you probably know, the EED requires EU countries to reduce their energy consumption and report on key data center performance indicators. As EcoStruxure IT Sustainability Lead Alison Matte told Data Centre Solutions Magazine, “Sustainability is a way to limit the energy consumption. It is also a way to reduce costs related to energy and to reduce waste in data centres where all these IT assets are being managed. We’re seeing DCIM play a role, and we are seeing an opportunity to help customers manage those IT assets and also to report on the regulations that are coming in.”
At Schneider Electric, we underwent a Green IT project with our own CIO team and learned that the tools weren’t oriented in a ‘user-friendly’ way. It wasn’t easy enough to organize the data as required, and sometimes the data was incomplete. It drove us to make changes and our new sustainability reporting metrics came about as a result of that learning.
So, what have we done for you lately? We have empowered you to meet the sustainability reporting challenge of determining how much energy your IT is consuming and how you can report on it so you can manage it more effectively.
What will we be doing for you in 2025?
I look to next year with optimism, knowing the EcoStruxure IT team will continue to build on this year’s success. We understand that the hybrid IT environment will continue to grow in its complexity especially as AI makes its mark on data centers. Our focus, as always, will be to support and guide our customers as they confront these challenges with the mission to have the most resilient, secure, and sustainable IT infrastructure anywhere.
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