Schneider Electric's cloud-based data center infrastructure management software provides physical device visibility and makes proactive recommendations.

The product line is called EcoStruxure, and it has been deployed in more than 480,000 sites. It increases data center infrastructure utilization by 30 percent and reduces false alarms by 30 percent, the company claims.

Here’s how it works. The EcoStruxure IT platform connects 1,400 customers — these include Telefónica, colocation provider INAP, Bainbridge Island School District, and animation studio Animal Logic. The vendor-agnostic software collects 300 million data points from 140,000 assets daily, which allows customers to benchmark their devices against the total population.

The platform also analyzes the data, reducing time spent manually sifting through device information. This also helps customers better understand the root cause of an alarm to avoid it happening again. And all of this is visible from a centralized console, which consolidates alarm notifications and makes recommendations.

“It’s not like the old days where you have a bespoke DCIM [data center infrastructure management] system on premises with a bunch of screens and people sitting there looking at the screens,” said Steve Carlini, VP of innovation and data center for Schneider Electric. “Now you can tailor when you want to be notified, how you want to be notified.”

Built-in analytics that generate recommendations and the ability to collaborate with Schneider Electric’s service department directly from the EcoStruxure app gives the platform a competitive advantage, he added. “It’s this whole different cloud-based platform instead of being on prem, and we believe this is the future.”

Carlini’s not alone. “The future of data center management will increasingly be remote, cloudy, and AI-driven, and I think DMaaS is going to play a central role in it,” said Rhonda Ascierto, VP of research at the Uptime Institute, which is part of The 451 Group, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

DMaaS stands for data center management-as-a-service. These platforms pull data from data center infrastructure and components and then monitor and analyze the information via cloud-based software.

While the technology is still in its very early stages, Schneider Electric is probably the furthest along. It started offering a pilot version of this new type of data center management technology last year. Eaton and Nlyte Software also provide DMaaS.

In the future, Schneider Electric’s service will provide more powerful analytics and predictive maintenance, Carlini said. “Our goal is to let people know before it fails,” he added.

During the first quarter of 2019 the company plans to launch EcoStruxure IT Advisor, which will provide data center capacity and asset management features, and a colocation-specific version of that software.

“It’s moving in the direction of being very automated,” Carlini said. “So you can set it up, and if these conditions happen you can start triggering services to happen automatically.”