The Internet of Things (IoT) is the latest trend that promises to revolutionise everything we do in our business and personal lives. Every technology business is introducing new products and services to enable the IoT and its promises, for enterprises of all types and sizes, and businesses are waking up to the fact that being IoT enabled will make the difference between staying in business or shutting their doors. Permanently.
It makes sense that the first wave of IoT enablement needs to be infrastructure, and having IoT-enabled network and data storage capability. This is why we at Netshield have added capabilities to our Data Centre in a Box (DCiB) and our self-contained cabinets (SCC) so they are now 100% IoT and cloud-enabled.
This not only allows customers to take advantage of the SNMP functionality already inherent in the cabinets, but also full AMQP and MQTT capabilities as well. In this way, their cabinets can easily communicate with, or link into, any cloud or IoT-enabled service, such as Azure and even AWS. Customers can now deploy their SCC for a multi- or single tenant environment too.
However, perhaps the main benefit of the upgrade, is that customers can view multiple installations of the SCCs in their environment through a single pane of glass, allowing them to make quantified decisions on environmental factors – heating, cooling, moisture and suchlike, which affect each individual installation, and then compare the results to define the best possible environmental conditions for each.
Having added intelligence in the cabinet simply allows IT better manage their service level agreements, irrespective of whether internal or third party, using the data collected. Moreover, the SCCs can be managed from within a private network, or can connect to the cloud and be remotely managed through the dashboard in either a public or hybrid cloud environment.
The possibilities are many, think about it. Multiple branch offices, for example, or buildings with multiple floors who do not want to cough up the cost of building a full datacentre per floor to support communications distribution on each. In fact, the application of the cabinets is highly scalable as they can be cascaded up to 16 SCCs (in a 2 x 8 cold aisle configuration).
Partners can also not only use the cabinets to manage their networking environment, but to insert or attach blades that host a cloud service, giving them the ability to offer physical infrastructure (IaaS), as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS). Everybody wins.
Top features of the Netshield DCiB SCCs include:
- IP54 rated Data Centre in a Box (DCIB) – is a completely self-contained, standalone server room that can be wheeled in and deployed within minutes
- It comes equipped with access control keypad, electronic locking, central SNMP, AMQP and MQTT management
- The device can be controlled through a dashboard from which you can, monitor temperature, flooding detection, leverage an application specific air conditioner and UPS, optional humidity monitor, smoke and fire detectors and extinguishers.
In short… It is a complete movable asset for a company.