Andreas Keiger, Head of Sales Europe at Rittal

© Rittal

"The digitalization of all areas of business, industry and commerce today requires fast and appropriate provision of IT solutions by data centers that can be procured easily and economically and operated efficiently and securely," explains Andreas Keiger, Head of Sales Europe at Rittal. "Our answer to this is a package of solutions for all scenarios, which we have developed together with our partners Innovo Cloud and Lefdal and are presenting for the first time in Hall 4 with a new trade fair presence at CeBIT 2017."

As a highlight, Rittal will be showing a 40-foot RiMatrix Balanced Cloud Center (BCC) container. The BCC is a ready-to-use and turnkey cloud data center. IT racks, containers, climate control technology and power supply from Rittal and the cloud infrastructure from iNNOVO Cloud as well as the associated cloud management software OpenStack enable companies to quickly set up various cloud models, according to the Herborn-based company. The offering ranges, for example, from a private cloud that is operated at the customer's premises with components including servers, storage and network systems (on-premise) to an external private cloud (off-premise) that is operated by a cloud provider from a cloud park. Rittal cites short-term availability, a pay-as-you-go model and the scalability of the system as further advantages of the concept.

Fast and turnkey: Edge Data Center

Drivers such as Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT) are not only increasing the amount of data, but also the demand for quickly available computing capacity close to where the data is generated. The keyword is edge computing. Rittal offers turnkey solutions with preconfigured, standardized and scalable infrastructure for the rapid setup of edge data centers. According to the manufacturer, the solutions can also be used with a high-availability room and therefore offer the necessary protection against heat, dust and dirt in industrial production environments. This should enable manufacturing companies to quickly and easily implement new IT environments for digitalized processes in order to adapt their IT to new challenges.

Another highlight: According to Rittal, the Lefdal Mine Datacenter (LMD) is one of the most efficient, environmentally friendly and secure data centers in Europe. Visitors to CeBIT will learn new details about the data center, which is powered exclusively by renewable energy and is currently being built on an area of 120,000 square meters on the west coast of Norway. The modular data center solutions implemented there allow very flexible use of IT systems with various models such as colocation, private cloud, ITaaS (IT Infrastructure as a Service) or DCaaS (Datacenter as a Service).

Visitors can find out why the Open Compute Project (OCP) could lead to a new generation of data centers in the "Innovative data center architectures and services" area. The exhibition area is dedicated to future-oriented architectures with the aim of making data centers more cost-effective and efficient. The OCP data centers operate with a continuous DC power supply (12V DC, 48V DC) and up to 21-inch IT racks (OCP 21'') in a 600 mm wide cabinet. The management software required for this will also be presented on site with partners, concludes Rittal's preview at CeBIT 2017.